Linux Namespaces Are a Poor Man's Plan 9 Namespaces

Post by SubjectToChange » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:06 AM UTC

akira2501 wrote: post #60

afr0ck wrote: post #47

The simple, everything is a file, model of Plan9 is what makes the namespaces API as clear and as general as it is. All the objects export the same file API. Every interaction with the OS objects is done through file open, create, read, write, etc. But it has it's drawbacks. First, it's not always easy to map every object operation into either an open read or write. With time, we should have seen a lot of ugly interf…

> First, it's not always easy to map every object operation into either an open read or write. It doesn't seem like it. Linux has a habit of multiplexing alternate functions through a single handle with additional and somewhat scary methods like ioctl. Plan9 manages this with servers, directories, and more than one path available for a single resource depending on what you're trying to access. This is far more sane.…

Post by amoss » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:09 AM UTC

somat wrote: post #62

amoss wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I use find for most commonly is to perform a hierarchical grep, i.e find . -exec grep -Hn regex \{\} \; How would you do that with the du | grep combo?

grep -R

Post by mike_hearn » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:16 AM UTC

t43562 wrote: post #72

mike_hearn wrote: post #59

The Plan 9 design wasn't as great as people like to think and it wouldn't have survived in the advertised form if Plan 9 actually had taken off. Actually it was already losing that aesthetic coherence quite early on in its lifetime. Hierarchical nouns, a fixed collection of verbs and a stream of bytes is aesthetically pleasing and can be helpful for developers hacking around, but is too limited and low level a vocabu…

A model need not be copied to be better. IMO there are lots of reasons for people to pursue their own ideas or ideas that don't require fundamental upgrades to their operating system. I can also imagine doing the reverse of what you suggest in that libraries could implement fundamental mechanisms like RPCs and the file model would just be one form of interface to them. This would enable all programs to work to a mini…

Post by rhabarba » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:18 AM UTC

phrenicfraud wrote: post #97

rhabarba wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The same person Go was designed by: - Robert Griesemer, known for nothing else, - Rob Pike, primarily known for sam(1), acme(1) and several other Plan 9 tools, the Blit (Unix's own graphical terminal), UTF-8 (with Ken Thompson), Inferno and Limbo, - and Ken Thompson, ancient god.

All these things you listed are objectively bad and a tumor and I'm glad that those that are gone, are gone for good, because the one that stayed is a menace to any programmer caring about his sanity.

Post by c00lio » Wed, Jun 21, 2023, 10:27 AM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #61

didntcheck wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, which lends weight to the idea that the shell should be a more extensive programming language. Then you can pass an arbitrary Predicate to the finder (which would likely just be a convenience function of about 5-20 lines), and receive a list of file objects for you to do what you want with That's the direction Powershell took, and to some extent was what other OSes were doing at the time of Unix. But Unix has b…

"That's the direction Powershell took, and to some extent was what other OSes were doing at the time of Unix. But Unix has become so ubiquitous and influential that we've forgotten that programs could pass more than ill-specified strings around ... The first step would be to stop putting "Unix philosophy" on a throne " Well yes, but I think it will be hard or rather impossible to convince the unix crowd of anything g…