On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 15:04 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Very well explained. I've seen this question come up lots of times > when introducing fs-based interfaces to people. When we had some > off-shore devs to bring up to speed, they kept coming back to it: "so > can we just define a protocol to put all these streams in one file?". I > tried to explaing that having them as distinct files *was* that > protocol, but it never stuck. I wish I'd had this explanation then.
I believe that part of the difficulty might come from the fact that Plan9 is exceptional in a sense that it offers an extremely effective environment in a basic package. You don't have to devise complicated GUI "shells" to be productive. Acme is as fancy as it gets. Unfortunately not everybody is lucky enough to be able to run Plan9 environment. People come from backgrounds of different level of suckiness. The environments where GUI "shells" are a necessity (did you know both KDE and GNOME implement incompatible filesystems at the level of their Explorers?). That's why these folks never trust their basic environment. They never expect the tools that come with it to be of any significant use. Their default reasoning is always to add more "protocols" to the bloated monsters they call "GUI shells". They just don't know any better. Thanks, Roman.
