Re: [9fans] Private Namespaces for Linux

[Ronald G Minnich <rminnich@lanl.gov>]

On Wed, 21 Nov 2001 okamoto@granite.cias.osakafu-u.ac.jp wrote:

> Why viro and Ronald are trying to implement Plan 9 features to
> Unices, which Plan 9 designers decided to abandon because it's
> no use to adopt old ideas to make new Operating system.

well, all things being equal, I think you are right. All things are not
equal:

- In 1995/6 when I started this project, Plan 9 was just simply not
available, unless you wanted to plunk down $200K+, which my company could
not afford. But I needed these ideas for work I was doing.

- From the beginning, ATT/Lucent did a really thorough job of screwing
Plan 9 distro up (seems to be a tradition with ATT and software). I doubt
they could have done more damage to it had they tried. I had some concern
at the time that these great ideas would die if ATT/Lucent succeeded in
their efforts to kill plan 9. An open source implementation seemed like a
good idea.

- For my purposes plan 9 is not (yet) a usable OS. Does PGI Fortran run on
Plan 9? No. Matlab? No. IDL? No. and so on. Installed software base is an
issue.

- It is not really hard to put private name spaces into a legacy OS. Just
because Plan 9 has excellent ideas, and Linux does not have those ideas,
is no reason not to put some of those excellent ideas into Linux,
especially if it is not that hard to do. If I have to have Linux, I might
as well try to make it more usable.

So that's why i did it.

ron