Re: [9fans] Plan9 development

[Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com>]

> When I write C code which I intend to be portable, I write against p9p, ...

I don't think this is fair to Gary's well-reasoned mail.
He explicitly said libtool was solving the problem of
providing a single consistent command line tool that
handled the job of building a *shared library* on a
variety of different systems.

Plan9port mostly addresses the problem of providing
a consistent C programming interface (library code)
across a variety of different systems.  There are the
9c and 9l scripts, but they are hardly a paragon of virtue
and don't even bother trying to create shared libraries.

That is, libtool says "you want to make shared libraries; I can help."
Plan9port says "sorry, shared libraries are too hard; don't do that."
Either approach could be valid depending on the context.

A lot of people here on 9fans lump all GNU software
together, but the different pieces can be very different,
and there are good ones.  To point some of those out:
GNU awk is a nice piece of software.  The core of
GNU grep is very well written even if the surrounding
utility has been embellished a bit too much.  Groff is
certainly less buggy and more capable than troff,
though Heirloom troff probably beats them both.

Russ