Re: [9front] The 9 Documentation Project

[hiro <23hiro@gmail.com>]

> my experience with this struggle over the past ten years has been that
> nobody ever helps. everyone has good ideas, but nobody ever helps. see also:
> bug tracker.

some ideas are no help and some help i gave was no good idea.
for me it has not been a struggle though.

even though our communication is very basic and non-organized, it
seems like a very relaxed, pleasantly experimental atmosphere and i
feel like i have enough space to envision the future, as opposed to
our dayjobs with only shitty uninformed code.

but that's just me, what about the 9front community? what do *we* want
out of this apart from a nice meditative shrine? what are the most
pressing issue?
obviously there can only be one valid goal: 9front world domination,
file servers for president. there has never been a bigger power vacuum
in the US before this clown as a president, and it's time we grab it
now.
for this we need to channel our strengths, and develop new strengths,
working together will benefit everybody.

for some it is hard to communicate efficiently, they have to become stronger.
some don't want to communicate, they have to become more passionate.

and some want to just play with the system and have some fun. they
have to carry on what they are doing, otherwise they should just go
outside and find something more fun that at least doesn't have
anything to do with sitting on a chair all day and waste their health
doing boring computershit.

but what if you decide to communicate, and collaborate, and want to
produce great code and great documentation for all of us?

generally people are most productive when writing stuff for
themselves. they shouldn't stop doing this.
just don't be sad it if isn't imported directly as is into mainline
9front. if their result is great, and if they are responsible and
collaborative they will want to either communicate the wisdom achieved
or even generalize their code into something that can be imported into
9front. only in the latter case we should need to actually *do*
anything (apart from just talk talk).

a lot of this is happening on IRC, which I sometimes follow closely.
when i think it's working well enough i'm obviously biased, as some
people reject IRC. for those what I think of as informal
drafts/proposals and ideas on irc is not visible in any other form or
document. there's often no mail, no website, no paper, no publication,
no pdf, nothing. I didn't feel a need for this to change, but
admittedly right now there's more noise, and the outcome is not as
easy to re-share with people that aren't already on that IRC channel
anyway. an example how it could be done differently is the iwp9
conferences, which always produced very interesting papers that I
enjoyed. this is a format i have missed lately, but IRC just makes it
so easy...

i heard recently a complaint that it's too hard to get patches for
9front approved and commented on. this included a second complaint
that cinap has been split into mail and irc, and i identified a belief
that cinap will only answer mail fast enough for their taste if nagged
on irc enough.
of course experience shows that many problems are most easily solved
if cinap solves them. but making more infrastructure to make cinap
solve more problems might not scale right because there's only one
cinap.

so instead i demand we find a process that allows people to *learn*
most efficiently from each other, perhaps also enabling more people to
share cinap's responsibilities.

technology and infrastructure can aid in this, but there's clearly a
bigger picture and social level that isn't as easily programmable. so
here we have to ask ourselves what we demands of others (or ourselves)
and what is really about our infrastructure.

9front sometimes moved faster, but IMO we have to allow it to move
slowly. we don't all have a well-funded research organization to pay
us for working on plan9, remember this is all free-time activity.

now, about the platforms that nobody gives any help on:

there's now a mail/web bug tracker, but i haven't seen any mails
lately. that's ok. i'm patient and still discovering.

there's web/hg fqa but it's not mounted by default in my 9front
install, so i only was able to check it rarely when i have a browser
on linux open, and sent only few patches (again, from linux and via
mail), been a while, i don't remember the process.

and there's a new 9front wiki (don't even remember where it is and if
it was web-only/werc or something else) and that is also not available
to me unless i acquire it's url and use my main browser, unless it's
already open on the other webbrowser on the other laptop or
workstation, but i can't remember.

i'm also not gonna start some kind of performance art like using
mothra either. to summarize: these web services are plainly not in my
namespace right now.
i admit it's my limitation, i'm sure i could organize my browser and
tab sessions more efficiently. but i have not (and i'm sure i'll
regret it forever).

for a longer time now, services are put online and taken offline
before anybody can get used to the systems and the processes involved
in using them (bell-labs servers, wikifs, google code servers, new
webshit werc/cat-v.org services, and most recently (for some of our
members): irc).

at the same time the 9front community is spreading and taking over
more social networks like discord, gridchat, github, bitbucket,
hackernews, twitter, matrix, mastodon, sr.ht, in turn making it harder
to track what is even going on. i try sometimes, but recently i didn't
have the time or browser real estate. it got too much.

i am experiencing a medium overload. already just mainline 9front hg
changes, mail and irc can already waste all my time. i am not able to
add even more mediums and still (ever?) engage in any significant way.

(in addition to having multiple mediums available, people (yes, me
included) demand that during one conversation the other side switches
between multiple mediums in real-time in lockstep with them.)

i don't think i'm alone, and i don't think the 9front community is the
only one suffering from medium overload.

if you can't afford all the dependencies all the different mediums
come with it creates a media gap.
the simplest example is that you might not be able to hg pull right
now as your 9front machine is not connected to the internet. you might
also not be able to copy&paste some error or make a screenshot and put
it online somewhere. you might not be able to access the fqa from
9front installer disc.
at best you might have another computer with windows/chrome, but even
then you might still not be able to copy&paste the lines you found
into your 9front, creating frequent spelling-based mistakes that waste
everybody's time on IRC when we try to help debug it...

and i think if you indiscriminately add more mediums it only gets worse.

let's not only think about what we need to do, or what we don't do,
let's also think about what we shouldn't do.

perhaps we can do with less for now. perhaps at least until we have
some more capacity worth managing with all this technology.

hiro