From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Date: Mon, 17 Jul 2000 09:12:42 +0000 From: Chris Locke Message-ID: <963777053.17893.0.nnrp-01.c2de4822@news.demon.co.uk> References: <200007161750.NAA09238@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Mash Topicbox-Message-UUID: df640e6e-eac8-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 If you are interested in Mash you should check out the new Inferno shell. There's a short paper on it here... http://www.vitanuova.com/papers/sh.html and a man page here... http://www.vitanuova.com/man/1/sh.html oh, and here is the mash man page... http://www.vitanuova.com/man/1/mash.html Mash was a great improvement on the original Inferno shell but suffered some problems itself. It is made fatter by the specific pattern/dependency list syntax built into the parser. I struggled to find a use for this outside of the make 'plug-in'. Most users aren't running make in the shell all the time, so we have a bunch of code (and remember that Inferno was originally intended for small devices) built in to the shell that, under normal usage, serves no purpose. There was also a problem with sharing 'contexts'. For example, when using the graphical Mash shell (wm/mash) you can use the tk 'plug-in' to create buttons that act as command shortcuts - when clicked they spit out a command as if it had been typed. However, they don't work if you run a sub-shell (e.g. mash) in the wm/mash window. The 'commands' are buffered up until the sub-shell exits. Another problem was that the dependency syntax wasn't the same as mk or make. On several projects I looked at setting up mash-make files. I tend to develop for Inferno on Plan9 using Acme and the host limbo compiler because it is faster at compiling than the Inferno (.dis) based limbo compiler. Consequently I found that to use mash-make I was having to maintain two different 'mkfile's. This was too much bother so I stuck with mk on Plan9 and the minor inconvenience of having to make sure my Plan9/Inferno namespaces overlapped. It would have made for a very interesting paper for USENIX, it would have been one of the few interesting things there. The proceedings were incredibly dull this year (apart from Rob's "getting dot dot right", which was a delight). Chris Locke. P.S. to BruceE, I didn't mean to be harsh on Mash, it really is a nice piece of work, any chance of posting up your paper?