This question has been bugging me for some time and I haven't found any discussions on the matter. It seems that at least the devices support could go into the original plan9 kernel. What's the reason for having a fork?
> Been there, done that. Not a line of text saying why 9atom appeared
> nor why the changes are not merged back into plan9.
there was at least one person i told that a certain bit of
atom hardware "works great," only to find out that it did
not work great with the distribution iso. i created 9atom
as a stopgap but it has continued to be useful since the
standard distribution doesn't support ken's file server and
not everything has been merged back in. it will be great
to get everything merged back in at some point.
i see its ongoing utility for me as a way to get some things
i'm working on packaged up so people can use them. for example,
one big change in 9atom is unicode 6.0 support. (that is,
32-bit runes.) i've used it to do a bit with cuniform.
i hope 9atom doesn't offend anyone. gripe at me off
like if you want to.
i hope to get the cannonical sources online in the near
future.
- erik
--This is just how I see this, you can choose to ignore the rest of the message.
i have always considered 9atom and a few other independent plan9 stuff
as something similar to the openbsd release strategy. Theres a stable
release and a current. 9atom is more like openbsd-current it's
bleeding edge, but it should be _more_ stable and has _more_ hardware
support. The official iso is more like openbsd-stable unless something
is broken you will only see bug fixes, until bell-labs considers the
new stuff as stable.
This is near total misrepresentation of the OpenBSD release process.