From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 12:22:33 +0000 From: "roger peppe" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@cse.psu.edu> Subject: Re: [9fans] Easiest way to make a filesystem In-Reply-To: <1200346141.4308.710.camel@work.sfbay.sun.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <326364c20801140111v1bf9b574p80ea0305edf09c14@mail.gmail.com> <1200346141.4308.710.camel@work.sfbay.sun.com> Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2e75d154-ead3-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Jan 14, 2008 9:29 PM, Roman Shaposhnik wrote: > I've been thinking about the same thing for quite some time now (and > don't you suspect that I have any real suggestions here, more like a > bunch of pet peeves). I guess my personal feeling of cognitive > dissonance comes from the fact that I can do pretty much anything in > Plan9 in a more or less simple shell script, but I can't easily "share" > the service of the shell scripts via namespace abstraction. in fact, in inferno at least, one can do a reasonable amount with sh-file2chan(1), memfs(1), bind(1) and export(1). it's good for putting things together on an ad hoc basis, at any rate. for a plan 9 example, pipefile(1) is a tiny program that is constructed similarly - the bugs section says it "should be rewritten to be a user-level file system". the problem is that if that was done, it would be probably three times the size. there's such a step change from the small (but useful) things that can be thrown together out of existing parts to writing a full-blown file server. it's probably a pipe dream, but every time i launch into the grunge work involved in writing a proper file server, i find myself wishing there was something a little more straightforward.