> is the threat standing? that is, if the plan 9 port is broken again > when 1.5 rolls around in just a few more months, does the plan 9 > port get booted then, too?
The threat is real: Plan 9 is a burden for the developers and lack of feedback is a valid cause for dismissal. Of the two-prong threat, only lack of builders is continuous: that the build may break and be neglected for a while is not as serious as knowing that no one is paying attention or, worse, that no one even knows that there is a problem. But the port is also in trouble. I dread the need to reconcile Gorka's work on ARM with the 1.2 release, I don't really know where to start. And as far as 386 and amd64 goes, I don't even know or grasp what ails the Bell Labs release (and I agree with you that the most recent adjustments are feeble at best), nevermind where we're standing with 9atom, 9front and the few other versions out in the wild. The solution is not with "open source" but with rolling up one's sleeves and figuring out how to converge as much as possible the different offerings. I don't think Go needs to be thrown away, I think it is a motivating force itself, but in this particular case we need some leadership to guide short-term development in a better direction. Listing the outstanding issues, technical or political, would be my starting point, but I was not involved in most of the (not so) recent in-fighting and I don't know how that ought to be resolved. ++L
