Thanks
Brantley
The Go(ogle) announcement video combined with running platforms
indicate MacOS.
More broadly, every few months I tend to get an email from
someone who is happy to have just discovered that sam is still
maintained and available for modern systems. A lot of the time
these are people who only used sam on Unix, never on Plan 9.
The plan9port.tgz file was downloaded from 2,522 unique
IP addresses in 2009, which I suspect is many more than
Plan 9 itself. In that sense, it's really nice to see the tools
getting a much wider exposure than they used to.
I haven't logged into a real Plan 9 system in many years,
but I use 9vx occasionally when I want to remind myself how
a real Plan 9 tool worked. It's always nice to be back,
however briefly.
Russ
Can you briefly tell us why you (Russ, Rob, Ken and Dave) no longer use
Plan9 ?
Because of missing apps or because of missing driver for your hardware ?
And do you still use venti ?
Phil;
Operating systems and programming languages have
strong network effects: it helps to use the same system
that everyone around you is using. In my group at MIT,
that meant FreeBSD and C++. I ran Plan 9 for the first
few years I was at MIT but gave up, because the lack of
a shared system made it too hard to collaborate.
When I switched to FreeBSD, I ported all the Plan 9 libraries
and tools so I could keep the rest of the user experience.
I still use venti, in that I still maintain the venti server that
takes care of backups for my old group at MIT. It uses
the plan9port venti, vbackup, and vnfs, all running on FreeBSD.
The venti server itself was my last real Plan 9 installation.
It's Coraid hardware, but I stripped the software and had installed
my own Plan 9 kernel to run venti on it directly. But before
I left MIT, the last thing I did was reinstall the machine using
FreeBSD so that others could help keep it up to date.
If I wasn't interacting with anyone else it'd be nice to keep
using Plan 9. But it's also nice to be able to use off the shelf
software instead of reinventing wheels (9fans runs on Linux)
and to have good hardware support done by other people
(I can shut my laptop and it goes to sleep, and even better,
when I open it again, it wakes up!). Being able to get those
things and still keep most of the Plan 9 user experience by
running Plan 9 from User Space is a compromise, but one
that works well for me.
Russ
I miss a lot of what Plan 9 did for me, but the concerns at work override that.
-rob
Thanks again.
Brantley
Oooooh, noooo!!! WHY?!?
As a plain user, a non-techie, I use Plan 9 native as my firs OS on
everyday basis... I log onto linux only for testing things that may be
worth porting, and for compiling the c++ stuff...
Please, do not let the native Plan 9 die...
++pac