Why the fork?
Someone told me on IRC that Plan9's maintaners can't keep up with the work and they don't accept much help.
Plan9 has been forked: 9front
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#22Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#23Oh boy! So now instead of one going nowhere OS, there are two going nowhere OSes, only with one going nowhere slightly faster.
Even if Plan 9 and 9front go nowhere, the ideas have already crept into other operating systems and userland tools. Linux has had 'mount --bind' for a while, and has last year introduced in-kernel support for 9P2000 (for mounting Plan 9 resources). bash and gawk have some weak support for interacting with the network via the filesystem. wmii actually speaks 9P2000 and uses it for scripting.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#24Oh boy! So now instead of one going nowhere OS, there are two going nowhere OSes, only with one going nowhere slightly faster.
Plan 9 was the first system to use UTF-8 and a /proc filesystem such as the one used in Linux.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#25The IRC channel (#cat-v on freenode) has been extra helpful and responsive. I've now got 9front mostly up and running on qemu and my T60, thanks to devs fixing drivers on the fly while I passed along screenshots of error messages. I've been interested in hacking on Plan 9 for a while but have had little luck getting it to boot before 9front (even 9atom).
A couple of years down the road, it would be delightfully perverse to end up with Plan 9 running in the server room and Linux/OSX on the devs' desktops. Maybe unlikely, but fun to consider.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#26Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.
I'm wondering, though, what use would Google make of P9? I guess it might make a great fit with Go.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#27After having some experience trying to write portable Bourne Shell scripts, I recently came across Tom Duff's paper[1] describing the "rc" shell used by Plan 9. I was quite blown away by the number of common shell-scripting problems it solves, and the elegance of the resulting language. There's no chance of it replacing, say, Python, but I'm sorely tempted to install Plan 9 From User Space and try out rc the next tim…
rc is a truly beautiful thing. I wrote a pretty complex web framework and CMS with it ( http://werc.cat-v.org ), and the more I used it, the more I loved it. I found it to be extremely well crafted, with every feature fitting beautifully with the rest, it misses many fancy things people expect, but once you know your way around what it has, you can do almost anything. Like awk, is one of those few languages that you…
Thanks for creating that framework. I had seen it in use a few times but it didn't dawn on me until reading your comments above the relation to Plan 9.
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#28After having some experience trying to write portable Bourne Shell scripts, I recently came across Tom Duff's paper[1] describing the "rc" shell used by Plan 9. I was quite blown away by the number of common shell-scripting problems it solves, and the elegance of the resulting language. There's no chance of it replacing, say, Python, but I'm sorely tempted to install Plan 9 From User Space and try out rc the next tim…
I was intrigued by your comment and took a look at the rc feature list, but I couldn't see any features that aren't available in bash 3.1 and above.
This takes nothing away from rc of course, which was around when bash was a simple re-implementation of sh, and may very well have been the inspiration for some of bash's modern features. [1]
With regards to scripting, since perl/python/ruby has supplanted shell for moderate to difficult tasks, I think it's perfectly reasonable to use bash/zsh for the occasional simple shell script. Arch Linux, for example, writes rc scripts in modern bash, significantly increasing legibility (given you can read modern bash).
Even if you stick to sh for maximum portability, if you use bash/zsh as an interactive shell, I would strongly encourage diving into the man page; modern shells, for all their shell\ quoting woes, have an amazing amount of concise constructs that make life at the command line quite pleasurable.
[1]: More likely is that Korn shell is the inspiration for both
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#29Does the fork still have the same de facto non-free license that plagued Plan9?
What do you mean by non-free?
Re: Plan9 has been forked: 9front
#30Personally, when considering the number of ex-Bell Labs employees there, I had hopes that Google would pick up the rights to Plan 9 and continue it. Plus, Google has the deep pockets needed to ensure proper device driver support for modern hardware.
I'm wondering, though, what use would Google make of P9? I guess it might make a great fit with Go.
Maybe it's not reasonable now or ever but I'd quite love to think of Google as a company capable of doing things that are immensely interesting but have no obvious, immediate, practical "use."
I don't know if they are there quite yet. It seems to me that they still strongly incentivize shipping products and making things people will use within in their corporate culture. I might be wrong. There could be a light coming on.