Re: [9fans] playing music (was RSA)

[Russ Cox <russcox@gmail.com>]

> What I think would be nifty to see (although I don't use plan9port
> much, and am not volunteering to do myself ;-) would be to have
> all the filesystem operations get translated into 9p messages
> and have a server for accessing the native unix filesystem and
> servers for each of the devices that you'd want to access from
> plan9ports (ie. /dev/audio).

This sounds great until you try it, and then it's
like you're living in this bizarre alternate universe
where you have to keep traack of which programs are
"9p-ified" and which are not, so there's no difference
between

    9 cat /etc/passwd
    cat /etc/passwd

but there is a difference between

9 cat /mnt/plumb/rules
cat /mnt/plumb/rules

which is just weird.  And then maybe you change the
shell so it can cd into these directories-which-don't-really-exist,
and then you can run 9p-ified programs while in those 
directories but not normal ones.  And you can't run
any executables in those directories, because they're
not really directories.  Or maybe you don't change the shell,
in which case 

    9 cat /mnt/plumb/rules

works but cd /mnt/plumb does not.

I agree it's a great idea in principle, but to do it right you
really have to go all the way and put the support in the 
kernel (like Ron and Eric did for Linux).   And then you're
way more system-specific than just writing a few lines of
code to initialize the audio device.

If enough of this kind of system-specific code shows up,
then I will probably create a libsysgoo that at least 
isolates it from the rest of the system.  But right now it's
just the tty code in 9term, and the code in libthread
but that isn't possible to split out.  (Audio is not there,
since Juke isn't in plan9port.)

Russ