Re: [9fans] List of companies that use Plan 9.

[Lucio De Re <lucio.dere@gmail.com>]

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Factually, Fossil is no big deal. Its design shortcomings have been raised
in the past from the Bell Labs side and the documentation (for Venti, I
think, but it's not very important) suggests that Fossil was knocked
together as a minimal Venti cache so the benefits of Venti could be
utilised and the old file system could be abandoned.

I somehow missed that discussion at the time and never went back to find
out how it panned out. But it sure feels with hindsight that Fossil became
the trigger for the 9front schism and that would explain the sensitivity on
either side. It's a shame, because the Venti potential remains
unrealised as there isn't the Fossil bridge (where development is
continuing, in 9front) to a better, full functionality file system that
includes Venti backing storage.

Which brings me to the question I have been meaning to ask: what scope does
Venti serve in the absence of Fossil? I appreciate that VAC is a handy form
of archiving, but does it justify the complexity of configuring and
maintaining a Venti archive? I know that vacfs has some failings I haven't
had the opportunity or the inclination to investigate, but exhibit
themselves only in P9P - in my experience. So is Venti only a trophy
application, or are there serious uses for it among the 9front community?

Lucio.

On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 7:04 PM Jacob Moody <moody@posixcafe.org> wrote:

> On 5/15/24 11:20, Don Bailey wrote:
> >
> > I have zero emotional attachment to Fossil. What I am asking for, not
> even demanding, is a fact-based assessment of the asserted issue. Pointing
> at the code is not an emotional attachment. It's literally the opposite.
> It's asking to demonstrate and document the issues, instead of asserting
> that something is awful because /you/ have had an emotional reaction to it
> failing. How did it fail? Can you reproduce it? What code is bad? Why is
> the code bad? If you can't answer these questions, maybe you
> > shouldn't have removed it.
> 
> The emotional accusation I understand, it really seems like it's just
> fossil that evokes this
> reaction out of people. Just fossil that makes people want us to prove
> without any reason of doubt that the
> code should have been removed. I also just don't understand why people are
> so attached to fossil.
> Is it because people feel like there is a high burden of evidence for
> touching the holy code
> as ordained by bell labs? We didn't want it so it went. If you think this
> is actually a
> mistake and there is a world of possibility to be had thanks to fossil in
> Plan 9 I encourage
> you to maintain fossil yourself and prove to us that we were wrong in
> thinking it was dead weight.
> 
> I want to specifically compare the discussion that happened on this thread
> between p9sk1
> and fossil. We think that no one should be using p9sk1, and so we spent
> the time to explain
> to others the very real, concrete and specific issues with the code and
> implementation.
> 
> We are not telling any other user of Plan 9 to not use fossil if they'd
> like, we simply don't want to
> deal with it in 9front. I think the burden of proof you are putting on us
> to make this
> decision would only make sense if we were advocating for other
> distributions and current
> users of fossil to no longer use it. It's fine, we're just not interested
> in it, sorry.
> 
> As I, and others, have pointed out now a couple of times. Adding fossil
> back to 9front
> is trivial. Perhaps you haven't had the experience of having to sit in irc
> and help
> new users get going with the system who really don't have opinions about
> anything and
> then dealing with the outcomes when things blow up. As you said fossil is
> not exactly
> easy to deal with, it needs a lot of special consideration. So why then
> are you complaining
> that 9front made the decision to remove that option for the uninformed
> user? Does it not
> make more sense to direct users towards a filesystem that is more
> resilient and requires
> less watering?
> 
> All of this is entirely moot with gefs right around the corner. I can't
> imagine someone
> willingly want to use fossil with gefs as a (soon to be) alternative.
> 


-- 
Lucio De Re
2 Piet Retief St
Kestell (Eastern Free State)
9860 South Africa

Ph.: +27 58 653 1433
Cell: +27 83 251 5824

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