On 8/19/21, hiro <23h...@gmail.com> wrote: >> I never said it was *the* development branch. > > lol > > but it is. > Correct. On two fronts, to coin a phrase. It is active and it is well supported.
It is the pragmatic end of the Plan 9 spectrum, courtesy of Cinap who clearly would be a Torvalds if Plan 9 had gained the traction of Linux. We are all lucky, in a somewhat masochistic sense, that Cinap is not Torvalds and Plan 9 came a little late on the scene and was "licenced to kill" itself. Wrong generation, that was, but for those who want everything and the kitchen sink, Linux is by far more convenient: I am typing this into Gmail's "basic HTML" in an obsolete and unsupported version of 32-bit Chromium under Linux Mint. I guess it IS my preference, even though I greatly regret that there aren't enough seconds left in my universe to migrate everything I can to my Plan 9 network. Which, given that this is a "philosophy" thread and both Rob and Russ are on board at least occasionally, may entitle me to ask: my understanding is that both R&R use P9P under a version of MacOS "du jour". I rely on P9P to relieve some of my frustrations with Linux (and there are hundreds, some go back to my NetBSD days) and in some crazy way I would tolerate logging in to Rio and I am totally sold on acme as my editor from my remote workstation to a suitably tweaked development server 300km away (ssh -fX...). Hell, this saved my bacon recently after a serious outage: "ssh -fX devbox acme -l acme.dump". How do I reward R&R for their efforts? And what have they neglected to contribute to the mental health of suffering people like me in the last few years :-) ? In any case, the point is not where I am, but where I come from and where I wish to be. I don't run Windows on my premises in any size or shape. I'll probably regret dropping it from my (cheap, non-plan 9-compatible) HP laptop on my most recent Linux Mint upgrade, but I have learnt what I can do with GPT and it doesn't bug me in the least to run Windows on a USB-3 connection to my drive (haven't needed to do that, yet, I may have to eat these words). I don't want to run Linux, either, in principle. Now that I have to think about it, I might not mind using Linux as a hypervisor and everything else under KVM, but for now the only hardware I own that supports Qemu-KVM is what I use for the Fossil/CPU server. If I can't see Linux, I can deal with it. One way or another, though, Linux has the ability to remind one frequently that it is in charge, in a manner neither NetBSD nor Plan 9 do. I don't see how I can create the seamless environment I seek by glueing together divergent systems such as 9front, 9legacy (my kernel I label 9miller, a version configured for my server and workstation, 32-bit X86 even though the server is the most advanced platform in my network, short of my Samsung phone), P9P under NetBSD (acme-over-remote-X works fine there, too) if these extremely preferable platforms (and I excluded P9P under Linux, but in fact that remains the main option, like right now, it's just the least preferable) continue to diverge, nay, are encouraged to diverge. And of course, the scarier possibility is that one or more of my essential ingredients will slip beyond my equipment's ability to run it. Already, Linux Mint 20.2 with Skype and Chrome is too much for 2GiB of memory in my laptop and I don't have the income that allows me to keep up with hardware advances. In summary, I am entirely contrary in attitude to Keith, because my interest lies in smaller, not bigger (I keep hoping I can afford a recent rPi model, but I can't entirely justify that, yet). Another way to get my point across may be to point out that I have no issue with improvements to Plan 9. Its philosophy is sound and palatable, much more so than the monstrosities of Windows and Linux that no sane individual should willingly enslave oneself to. Windows is still extremely insecure and not even slightly open to a security audit, although I bet the NSA has no qualms exploiting what the see as security "features" from the comfort of a source licence paid for by the U.S.'s subjects; Linux is bloated beyond comprehension and I'm also not impressed with the OSS's approach to software quality. But divergence is in no manner "improvement", it needs to be negotiated back into the "core values". I appreciate that there are various costs associated with such "upstreaming" and that is why I'm suggesting that the P9F should take it on, identify the costs and also arbitrate, from a position of common wisdom, what is "core" and what is tangential. Note that "core" then becomes a future entity, not a past one, in this case. Note: 9fronters may well believe that outsiders refuse to grant them an identity they feel they have worked hard at earning. What they seem to miss that even though there may actually be an "inside", the outside is not the homogenous enemy they paint us as. Interestingly, what made 9front the success story it is - and Plan 9 the orphan OS - is precisely that "inside". I see the same happening here in South Africa with factionalism and in the U.S. with the various nationalist movements. It is clearly a very powerful human emotion. A transparent history of decisions in this matter would prevent losing any interesting proposals - yes, we need better than Git, but Git is painfully "enough" to start with, even if as I get more familiar with Git I'm starting to believe, hopefully wrongly, that Plan 9 may have to bend towards supporting symbolic links to deal with it if it is going to be a long run - and will raise a chuckle or two when future archeologists come across it. I doubt they'll be able to do any more than raise eyebrows when they try that with Linux. One last, not quite related matter: Plan 9 seems limited never to provide a conventional browsing experience for its audience. What does that actually say about Plan 9's future? That incidentally, must be qualified by the reality that NetBSD doesn't fare much better: I have certainly not had the stomach to migrate my workstation from Linux to NetBSD - even less so my laptop - precisely because even Chromium isn't "du jour" enough for the real world. 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