Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[Shawn Rutledge <lists@ecloud.org>]

On May 7, 2024, at 2:14 AM, sirjofri <sirjofri+ml-9front@sirjofri.de> wrote:
> In the other case, where you want your machine to always serve services, that machine is most probably a cpu by definition. Nowadays there's no reason to not run a cpu if you need services. In the beginning there were different kernels if I remember correctly, which meant a big difference, but nowadays it's only a different configuration.

I just don’t see much point in keeping it as split as it still is.  For some reason a 9front install is a term by default, and not being set up to run services by default seems like a needless limitation.  But if you switch to cpu, it’s a little extra work to get it to be a useful machine to sit in front of (even though “text mode” is already graphical), which is also a needless limitation.  It took me a few hours to learn how to customize the startup process at first, and I didn’t memorize it, so next time I’d have to look at the machines on which I already did it to remember what exactly I did.  When a newbie starts with one machine and then wants to try starting up network services shortly afterwards, it should be more directly possible, IMO; and the directory-of-services approach seems like a good one to me, which should not be ruled out by having a term by default.  Unless you are actually in a lab environment with shared machines, nobody expects a diskless terminal anymore; and it’s not a great introduction to what Plan 9 can do, to have that be the default.

If the majority thinks there needs to continue to be a distinction though, then maybe the installer should ask about the machine’s intended role at installation time, and try to achieve a suitable out-of-the-box experience for all the choices.