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What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

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Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#31

Post by sapilla »

setr wrote: post #18
userbinator wrote: post #9

A browser that supports JavaScript. This appears to be one of those sites that should ostensibly be just static text, but the source has none of the content and not even Google's text-only cache manages to show anything. Rather ironic this page is itself inaccessible to users of Plan9...

It used to be a very simple static website, and much more likely than not was just that at the time people were writing to the wiki Like last year or something they apparently decided to migrate to this mess of a system, for reasons unknown to me. I think it might be mediawiki software?

It's custom, by Ward Cunningham IIRC.

I complained about there being no static site anymore but that was not a priority.

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#32

Post by boomlinde »

msla wrote: post #23

> vi, emacs, ... >> Try acme or sam. The idea that your OS determines your text editor is fundamentally broken. The idea that your OS determines your GUI model is also fundamentally broken. Both of those notions destroy loose coupling, which is a fundamental design principle. And this... > objects >> BellLabs didn't need them since the complexity is back under control. ... is really too incoherent to refute.

> The idea that your OS determines your text editor is fundamentally broken.

> Both of those notions destroy loose coupling, which is a fundamental design principle.

The available text editors on the system determines your text editor. If you want a different editor, nothing stops you from porting it.

You should try porting Emacs to Plan 9 but I think you'll find that it isn't so loosely coupled itself. Meanwhile, you can run sam and acme in your favorite Unix clone. Not a huge fan of them, personally

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#33

Post by rakoo »

ori_b wrote: post #4
JadeNB wrote: post #2

> find > The unix find is a SwissArmyKnife. In PlanNine, the TreeWalking is done by du -- a unix `find . -print` is in PlanNine: `du -a|awk '{print $2}'` Ah, a clearly much more natural replacement. EDIT: I got downvoted, but I'm not complaining about it, but rather happy to acknowledge the error of my ways. I cut and pasted what I thought was `du -alawk '{print $2}'`, a mish-mash of 5 unexplained command-line switch…

There's also walk, at least in 9front: http://man.9front.org/1/walk

UNIX: To recursively traverse directories, use find(1)

Plan 9: find(1) is bloat, use du -a | awk '{print $2}'

UNIX: this is complicated to remember and type

Plan 9: oh you can also use walk(1) to recursively traverse directories

UNIX: so... like find(1) ?

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#34

Post by emmelaich »

JadeNB wrote: post #2

> find > The unix find is a SwissArmyKnife. In PlanNine, the TreeWalking is done by du -- a unix `find . -print` is in PlanNine: `du -a|awk '{print $2}'` Ah, a clearly much more natural replacement. EDIT: I got downvoted, but I'm not complaining about it, but rather happy to acknowledge the error of my ways. I cut and pasted what I thought was `du -alawk '{print $2}'`, a mish-mash of 5 unexplained command-line switch…

I'm with you. The mantra is "do one thing and do it well"

So why is du being generalised to a file system walker?

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#35

Post by pushpop »

dleslie wrote: post #7

Reads like what's missing is all the quality of life tools and polish that developers rely on daily. Unix hating, or Unix environment hating, is an uphill battle these days. Nowadays every major desktop and most phones have, or can have, some kind of Unix or Unix-like shell. It's a bit like hating C. I'll probably still be writing C in ten years. I'm not so certain about _any other language_.

Plan 9 isn’t UNIX hating. It’s a successor to UNIX. Many of the things we take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems are actually kludge written to address a short coming of UNIX. Plan 9 was invented to take lessons learned from that and build on UNIX from a ground up reimagining. Thus it is going to differ in some ways while feeling very similar in others.

I think it’s fair to say that Plan 9 is a bit less exciting these days because some of the really great ideas from Plan 9 has seeped its way into Linux and UNIX. But there is also some degree of “momentum lock-in” going on too where UNIX is what people are familiar with so it’s what people expect. Though it’s probably more accurate to say “GNU” these days rather than UNIX (if the conversations about people loading GNU coreutils on Macs via homebrew are anything to be believed)

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#36

Post by jacquesm »

pushpop wrote: post #35
dleslie wrote: post #7

Reads like what's missing is all the quality of life tools and polish that developers rely on daily. Unix hating, or Unix environment hating, is an uphill battle these days. Nowadays every major desktop and most phones have, or can have, some kind of Unix or Unix-like shell. It's a bit like hating C. I'll probably still be writing C in ten years. I'm not so certain about _any other language_.

Plan 9 isn’t UNIX hating. It’s a successor to UNIX. Many of the things we take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems are actually kludge written to address a short coming of UNIX. Plan 9 was invented to take lessons learned from that and build on UNIX from a ground up reimagining. Thus it is going to differ in some ways while feeling very similar in others. I think it’s fair to say that Plan 9 is a bit less excit…

Plan 9 is more UNIX than UNIX itself. It did away with all the special cases and the result is a beautiful way to create systems components.

There are only two operating systems that I've worked with that I actually really enjoyed, the one is QnX and the other is Plan 9, everything else feels like a series of kludges.

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#37

Post by ori_b »

rakoo wrote: post #33
ori_b wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also walk, at least in 9front: http://man.9front.org/1/walk

UNIX: To recursively traverse directories, use find(1) Plan 9: find(1) is bloat, use du -a | awk '{print $2}' UNIX: this is complicated to remember and type Plan 9: oh you can also use walk(1) to recursively traverse directories UNIX: so... like find(1) ?

Compare the manpages for find and walk.

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#38

Post by pushpop »

jacquesm wrote: post #36
pushpop wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plan 9 isn’t UNIX hating. It’s a successor to UNIX. Many of the things we take for granted in UNIX and UNIX-like systems are actually kludge written to address a short coming of UNIX. Plan 9 was invented to take lessons learned from that and build on UNIX from a ground up reimagining. Thus it is going to differ in some ways while feeling very similar in others. I think it’s fair to say that Plan 9 is a bit less excit…

Plan 9 is more UNIX than UNIX itself. It did away with all the special cases and the result is a beautiful way to create systems components. There are only two operating systems that I've worked with that I actually really enjoyed, the one is QnX and the other is Plan 9, everything else feels like a series of kludges.

I can sympathise with that. UNIX does get a lot right and if you’re just scratching the surface of things it feels a very powerful system. There is a lot to like there but the more I delved deeper in my career the more ugliness I’d run into. The thing with UNIX is it’s “good enough” in most areas that people don’t always notice those pain points and it’s ingrained enough that the alternatives often feel “worse” just by virtue of being different.

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#39

Post by brianpgordon »

enneff wrote: post #26
brianpgordon wrote: post #8

I'm not sure I follow the argument about symbolic links. What do they have to do with the root UNIX thinking that it owns the whole filesystem? I don't often see symlinks used in the context of crossing "imported" (mounted?) parts of the filesystem - instead, I use them most often to provide aliases so that the same file/directory can be accessed with multiple names.

If you want the same thing to have multiple names you can just use a hard link. Symlinks are a broken idea in Plan9 because whether they’re relative or absolute they may not point to the same thing depending on how you have your namespace set up. In plan9 each user has their own set of bound file systems (like mounts, but for users not the system as a while), and so has their own logical view of the local and remote…

On Unix I much prefer using symlinks to hard links. Hard links are super confusing when you don't know/remember that they're there. AFAIK there's no easy way to get ls to display them for what they are. If you suspect that something is a hardlink you have to squint at the inode numbers and see if you have duplicates. But if you use symlinks, ls will just tell you, and give you both the link name and destination by default.

I suppose you could use ls_colors to colorize hard links to make them more visible, but then you have to configure that on every server you ssh to.

Re: What Is Not in Plan Nine (2012)

#40

Post by msla »

msla wrote: post #22
stonogo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (how would you ever figure out what " $#* " means?) It's in the manual. > Now where did that @#!$ sysadmin put it? The point of Plan 9 is that you don't rely on the sysadmin to put things places for you. You'd mount your home filesystem from wherever it lives and everything would be back to where you expect it. You could even mount /bin from whatever machine you wanted. Plan 9 does not work in pieces. It only works…

> You could even mount /bin from whatever machine you wanted. Neat! Now my system is completely unusable if another computer is down or unreachable! And to think people around here bad-mouth cloud computing.

The fact this got downvoted without discussion must prove it completely discredits Plan 9.
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