If this comes across as a troll, keep in mind that it is your interpretation that makes it so, a lesson we South Africans are still busy learning, at our country's expense.
I've got Fossil running under 9front; thanks to all those who prodded me (and others). I would be happier knowing that there is a "canonical" version rather than at least two varieties as appears to be the case from the above discussion, but I'd rather not spoil the moment.
My point all along was that if the source (Fossil or other) is not included in the (9front) distribution, a (bad) decision is being made by arbitrary (non)contributors for all the silent participants who may not even know about it. Why would anyone want to play God? Isn't Google bad enough?
I concede that I didn't know myself what I was looking for (I think what "I" need is for 9legacy to boot, install and possibly run, from a USB stick on any PC hardware, and support both IDE and SATA where present) and my rather vague question was intended to make the details less sketchy. Instead, I got a tirade about what I was or was not ready, willing or able to contribute. Fortunately, that tends to have the desired effect with me, so right now I haven't yet recovered my decades of pretty pointless effort, but I know I can do it, with sufficient application, it is no longer lost or teetering on edge of the abyss.
As for the cryptography angle, that was an eye opener for sure and for many, apparently. On my part, I still don't have SSH2 working from my own Plan 9 "legacy", I haven't been able to shoehorn the right combination of 9legacy patches into it. It is surprising that I haven't broken it entirely and I know I came close to doing that on occasion. I had a working version of ssh-agent working smoothly on my system, both for Plan 9 and P9P (both Linux and NetBSD), but a hardware failure exposed my lack of discipline and I haven't had the need or fortitude to recover the working "branch" from Git, that version control is too complicated for me to feel comfortable with it, I use it only under duress. Now, after suggestions on this forum that support my impressions, I want to look at bringing "the other Fossil" on board using PostgreSQL running under NetBSD instead of embedded SQLite. Don't hold your breath, though.
One more point, but I may raise more later, seeing that there is a claimed interest in how others use the generic Plan 9 platform: I long ago ported the OpenLDAP tools to Plan 9 and I continually use them to access remote directories with them from a scrappy rc shell script. I noted only recently that the OpenLDAP distribution has an option to build only the tools and library, which vindicates my approach which happened rather serendipitously. I need to investigate that further, my version of the tool I think goes back to 2.3 or thereabouts. Graphviz I have also been unable to promote past a very early version, but it works quite nicely for my occasional use of Dot.
Let me point out also that I have paid absolutely no attention to licencing requirements; where I live the culture remains that of "sanction busting" from the Apartheid era and IP prosecutions don't seem to occur very often. I do think that P9F would be kept quite busy assisting those of us that may need legal advice or assistance and in some respects I think that role would be beneficial to all of us - including myself - and it seems a role that P9F is already playing. Just my impression, of course, but earlier discussion does bring that to mind.
In short: I totally agree with Ian, we are responsible for what and how gets discussed here.
Lucio.