[9fans] Rio for window grouping/session management

[leimy2k@speakeasy.net]

I've taken to using pairs of windows for my faces/Acme Mail windows and I was thinking about how best to manage these pairs as a unit.  It seems the most natural way in Plan 9 is to use a "sub-rio" inside the top-level rio session.  This way I've a little hierarchy of sessions to manage related programs.

I use the following script to setup my upas/fs environment for this "sub-rio".

---
#!/bin/rc

upasname=leimy@opendarwin.org

plumber
upas/fs -f /imaps/mail.opendarwin.org
window -m acme -l $home^/adumps/amail.dump
faces
---

This actually works really well (for me) for this simple pairing.  I can clobber the whole session, move it around and the association stays the same.  One thing that kind of sucks is the "rio" label that gets set during rio startup that I do before running this script.

So, to scratch my own itch and satisfy my curiosity, I added a flag to my copy of rio "-l" which was originally intended to take an argument for the label rio should run under.  I decided to leave it blank as I can just use "label" before starting the sub-rio to achieve the same effect.

I was going to submit this as a patch [with the appropriate man page updates] but someone mentioned that I might be able to get the same effect from "exportfs".  

I'd like to know more about that option.  Obviously not changing rio's source [even though it's a 3 liner] is probably a better way to go.

It also occurs to me that the sort of things I want to do are probably more Plan B-like.  Being able to tar up a window environment session and then restore it by untarring seems really cool.

This is longer than I wanted it to be,

Dave