> since it's not clear to me from reading this (forgive my reading > comprehension), > i run 9atom on rb, kw, and rpi in addition to amd64. i run the pc and pcpae > kernels when there are changes. i know others also run 9atom on the rb. > sadly i don't have a teg2 or original beagle.
One can interpret this as advocacy for 9atom or confrontation against the Bell Labs release. It's OK, I am more of a bigot for sticking to the BLR than you are for promoting your valuable efforts, but I don't want to disclose all the reasons for me being such a bigot, it would be boring without being "relaxing". However, the issue remains that there could be one true Plan 9 if the community kept their bigotry under control and contributed useful effort in its stead. Now, there are two major hurdles in my opinion, and everything pales against them. Feel free to argue with that, I'm not adequately informed and much prepared to learn: (1) Bell Labs are lagging behind 9atom and 9front in support for a lot of hardware (old and new), a situation that, by getting progressively worse may cause them to drop out of the race altogether and (2) The amount of effort and ego bashing required to bring the different releases in line is considerable and no one is likely to take such a mission on without knowing that, at minimum, the "owners" of the various distributions are willingly supportive of such efforts. Now, point (1) can be addressed by treating the Bell Labs distribution as one more "fork" and proceeding towards a new distribution which will eventually be accepted by Bell Labs as well, while (2) needs the Plan 9 community to rally behind a single communication channel, open to all willing contributors and lurkers, where amendments to each fork are submitted for discussion. In particular, it is essential that CLs be shaped in a way that each fork can accept them, especially the convergence fork. Now, I'm not in a position to suggest how each of these objectives can be attained and if I go off and do something like I proposed earlier, there will be little chance that my efforts will stay ahead of environmental changes. Thus, I think the floor should be opened to all interested parties to discuss how we can combine our efforts with minimal cost in resources. We have no deadlines, we just need to have clear objectives and willing contributors. Doing without detractors would be great, but I wouldn't count on that much. ++L
