From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] WebDAV file system From: "Skip Tavakkolian" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:42:25 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 123b62b8-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 You're not kidding. For every distributed-fs (to use the term loosely) like WebDAV that is publicized, there are many variations that are in products that get used everyday. There is no mentoring and most developers out there either have the patience or given the time to study the state of technology. The ready-shoot-aim school of development is the norm. Organizations like Bell Labs are the exception. The situation is not hopeless. Much as I like to believe otherwise, I have been convinced that most people don't like to think for themselves and would like others to do it for them (herd mentality). So all it takes is a "killer app", a success story to push concepts like Plan9's into the mainstream. Then you'll have a new crop of programmers having their own misconceptions, building new misguided derivatives. That's life. > An infinite number. Every year or two someone figures out that, > hey, we can use fad-of-moment to write a remote file system protocol, > without thinking that a) it's only fad-of-moment, not inherently > valuable and that b) knowing nothing about how to write a file > system protocol should stop me from barging ahead willy-nilly. > > as you might sense, this is a hot button for me, right next to > the 'hey, i can write a cool naming hack to make fad-of-moment > work with this system'.