Re: [9fans] p9f mention of 9front

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

Eish! I really can't resist, can I?

On 6/24/21, Romano <unobe@cpan.org> wrote:
> [...]  But I'm a nobody, so I'm probably not going to persuade
> anyone.
>
Let me try and keep this short, but it won't be easy.

Firstly, this is not intended as an offence, particularly against
Romano, it is merely an alert against our poorly understood "human
nature".

The sentiment implied in the sentence above is a bare-faced lie.
Romano, you need not defend it, I utter lies like this daily, multiple
times, and I spend my time mostly in solitude :-).

Thing is, we try hard to be tactful or diplomatic and fail to be
convincing because we don't actually know how to respond to similar
falsehoods directed at us. My own problem is that I have no scientific
foundations for what follows, only personal experience in a context
where multiple natural "languages" flow freely and misunderstandings
are more the norm than the exception. Here, we continue to pay a high
price for not having resolved this madness at birth.

9front got off on a bad footing, in my recollection more a
generational clash than anything caused by one or more technical
issue. Repairing the burnt bridges requires undoing all the antagonism
that has been accumulated since, plus more than just a smidgen of
technical savvy.

But the emotional need for approval did lead to acrimony and acrimony
led to the eventual 9 fork and today one can still run 2Ed
applications on 9legacy (bar occasional mishaps - not that I can think
of any), but not 9front applications without modification. That, is a
very clear ring-fence. And it makes me quite sad, but realistically,
it would take quite a lot of tolerance, effort and time to merge the
two streams and something would undoubtably be lost in the process of
compromising. Not least, there would be ego damage (I have my own
skeletons I would not want to release from the cupboard next to the
one implied above).

The point of the above is simple: only a neutral party can put
Plan/9/Front together again and there are more pressing issues for the
average participant to address that stand firmly in the way. Harping
on the politics is the wrong thing to do, eventually survival of the
fittest is going to dictate the path that will be taken. And the
fittest, accidentally or intentionally, in the current ecosystem, in
my opinion is plan9port, at least until Torvalds stops dictating the
path Linux takes: our culture can't resist a strong personality
(that's the "cult" in "culture"), but also cannot survive without
continuity, surprise, surprise.

The democracy that may favour intellect over emotion needs to be an
artifact able to adjust to changing contexts, consciously. The Plan 9
Foundation may or may not have that in its genome. Miller is a
reminder that a port to a different architecture is the product of
both individual genius (and, yes, Cinap does that, also, I don't mean
to be disrespectful) and sound foundations.

What Plan 9 needs is a Nemo to redo his analysis of 3Ed and offer a
more modern version focused on Plan 9 as the glue between the
MS-Windows/Apple user interface (based on a perceived and certainly
not genuine security) and the scrappy Turing machines Intel and
co-conspirators are foisting on us. And to be ready for the next
generation of hardware that may prevent this generation producing an
Atlantis-sized civilisation collapse. Of course, that's not to suggest
this must be Nemo's retirement package, it means that the right
calibre of humans must undertake to perform such an analysis to its
completion.

Lucio.

PS: I would have liked to bring Minix-3 into the rant above, but I
have yet to explore to my satisfaction what it really represents.
Suffice it to say that it may be able to run p9p and that is rather an
interesting curved ball.

The other oddity is the smart mobile computer we like to call a
"phone". Why is there no Plan 9 flavour running on at least some
flavour of it?

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