Re: [9front] Enabling a service

[sl@stanleylieber.com]

> Contrary to many people's experience, I actually find 
> that for the kind of latency I get over coffee shop wifi 
> to my home, remote rio sessions behave fairly well (though 
> displaying static images is quite painful).

but this doesn't actually sound contrary.

text is generally fine, even in drawterm-over-the-internet.  it's when
you try to work with anything other than text that life gets hectic.
i never had a lot of complaints until plan 9 became more than a text
editor for me and i started trying to live in it full-time.

people nowadays are doing a lot more with their plan 9 than they were
even when we started 9front.  but most of that stuff is either too
painful to be practical or flat out impossible unless your constituent
distributed parts live close together on a fast network.

the end result is that many of the very cool features we come to plan
9 for in the first place are pretty much useless most of the time.
and this drives travelers to just running stand alone systems.

this inherent tension between "plan 9 is a distributed environment"
and "nobody expected us to be quite *that* distributed" remains
unresolved, and largely unaddressed.  it's not really a fault of the
original concept, but it does expose weaknesses (or, perhaps more
accurately, period appropriate shortsightedness nobody could blame
them for) in the specific implementations of various components.

i like the suggestions made so far about automatic caching schemes.  i
have played around with cfs partitions, but that mechanism at least
never seems to deliver the promised results.

sl