[9fans] porting from vs. porting to Plan 9

[mirtchov@cpsc.ucalgary.ca]

I remember how thrilled I was when I first saw /usr/ports/plan9 on a
FreeBSD system -- my first reaction was "woo-hoo, I don't need an
extra machine to run Plan 9 on!"...  Later on I came to realize that
they weren't what I thought they were, and that if I want the real
thing I should just get the real thing and use it, not look for a
replacement.

Now that it seems everybody is happy with porting Plan 9's libs to
other operating systems, I'm reminded of these ports again, but not in
a good way.  You see, I hold the opinion that if Plan 9 becomes a
'niche' OS, one that people run in VMWare or otherwise hosted on top
of other systems, it will gradually loose its appeal, and
disappear.  I believe the same will happen if its libraries were
ported elsewhere.

Whether Plan 9 libs on lunix are beneficial (to lunix) is also
questionable -- it's nice to have libdraw for example, but if not
widely adopted it is just a (very small, admittedly) drop of code in
the huge sea that is X.  Besides, non-9fans have gotten used to
looking for familiar things in lunix, and it will be harder to educate
them of the _proper_ Plan 9 way in their world, on their turf, than to
bring them in ours -- they all end up liking Plan 9 at the end, but
that's because they are able to tear off the lunix-built habits by
being forced to live in a Plan 9 environment.

There is a great deal of opposition to bringing/porting other apps to
Plan 9, and I admit I was expecting to see the same opposition to
porting Plan 9's libs to other systems: "why would they want it there
anyway?  throwing pearls before swine!" was going through my head.

You see, without the reason to run Plan 9 it'll just become yet
another dead operating system, just like Oberon recently discussed --
the ideas from it live here to an extent, but the system itself has
long gone...

Opinions?

Andrey