Re: [9fans] ports ...

[Jack Johnson <fragment@nas.com>]

On Wed, 4 Jun 2003, ron minnich wrote:
> I noticed somebody asking about the MIPS and SPARC ports.
>
> Hey, you want to do a port, do something interesting like the K8 ...

It's funny the dichotomy about the porting issue.  Some people
like/want/need to use new hardware and others like/want/need to
resuscitate older hardware.  Linux has this legacy hardware support for
which (I think) they do an increasingly poorer job of supporting (NetBSD
probably does a better job of continuing support).  So, for everybody,
recent hardware tends to get decent support for a while, then a kind of
"recovery support" where the popular items get fixed when they break under
version x, then you get the trailing stuff where popular hardware from
five generations ago is free or nearly free and there's a request or push
for new support for legacy hardware.

Plan 9 always intrigued me with its thin workstation concept, where the
workstation can be so-so to barely bearable but always supported by decent
(or exceptional) file/cpu servers.

So, I suppose I'm just rambling, but my vote is equally split between
SPARC and K8.

-Jack