From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: From: Ethan Grammatikidis To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v936) Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:56:16 +0100 References: <20100325114948.GA7249@polynum.com> <20100325114948.GA7249@polynum.com> , <31C84C15-2EE3-46CA-BE9F-48F20886ADF7@fastmail.fm> Subject: Re: [9fans] Man pages for add-ons Topicbox-Message-UUID: f6f275ae-ead5-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On 27 Mar 2010, at 16:46, Tim Newsham wrote: >> enough. We say we deal with it with namespaces, but the bindings on >> a freshly-installed Plan 9 box already make a much longer list than >> any $PATH I can imagine! > > but you don't have a LD_LIBRARY_PATH, a MANPTH, or any number of > other search paths. Or symlinks. What is the total length of all > of your paths plus symlinks? PATHs on my box (including MANPATH and INFOPATH) total 27 entries. Symlinks, excluding libraries, Wine, and backups of old systems: 1, for a total of 28. Wine has 17 symlinks but what I do with Wine could almost as easily be done with a VM. There are 42 binds and mounts in my Plan 9 VM's namespace, but several seem to be no-ops (bind / /; bind /n /n), and it's a bit hard to filter out both those and the hardware and system mounts from the list. The number of functional dir-to-dir binds seems to be around 7. I feel like I'm missing something. Adding the number of mounts on my un*x box brings its total to 36, still lower than Plan 9's. All this reminds me of one of my biggest gripes with unix, which may be relevant to the discussion here. Both env vars and namespaces are inherited, and while that's a strength it's also a weakness. I haven't used Plan 9 enough to know if it's a problem for Plan 9, but using Linux outside the wonderful world of desktop environments I would regularly run into trouble because I'd have to change a variable, whether $BROWSER or $PATH or whatever, and for it to take full effect I'd have to log out & back in. I always have several things on the go at once: typically a couple dozen web pages open; several files of one sort or another; IRC and frequently another communication program; mail; a calendar; often a music player; you get the picture. In such an environment "re-logging" is a huge disruption. Perhaps if namespace changes only require restarting the plumber it wouldn't be bad, but there's still the matter of entering the binds at least twice too; once in lib/profile (which you have to go and open) and once per relevant terminal window. -- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. -- Alan Perlis