In regards to the 4th this year, we did have some oddities that occurred out on the mountain. Around 9:18 AM EST, for the first time in years, I heard coyotes in the distance, not too
far off from the house. This was enough to make Ms. DMad call in all the cats.
Most of my day was spent either in the gardnes, or messing with my 9Front VPS and poking around on the 9Front community server with a new friend, gon. Like gopher and gemini, the
biggest take away from understanding 9Front is how it was intended to be used. Philosophically, SMJ has a pretty good grasp on what Plan9 was meant to do as far as UNIX goes.
Namespace (ns) binds is something anyone new to the system needs to grok - it's really not that alien of a concept, but it's easy to miss if one is overwhelmed by their first
interactions with rio, plumbing and the fact snarf simply means 'copy' (not an oblique reference to the Thundercats explicative).
Some concerns I have about 9Front's direction come from a tech writer named, Liam Proven his talk is here :
https://fosdem.org/2024/schedule/event/fosdem-2024-3095-one-way-forward-finding-a-path-to-what-comes-after-unix/
Proven gets the concept of Plan9(or 9Front). He understands code bloat. However, it appears to me, as a person in the crowd for the lecture pointed out, that some of his proposals
would add bloat to Plan9. Proven admits he 'couldn't code his way out of paperbag' (his words) (I get it, I can barely code myself, but I can read it), so I'm unsure if his lack of
familiarity with what Plan9 already does, contributes to his conceptulization of his ideas for Plan9's future. He posits that Plan9 would make a great VM manager, lite OS manager
etc.- these topics left me with more questions myself. His FOSDEM lecture is worth watching. His critique of Debian's massive code base is spot on, however, a research UNIX system
best choice for a new hypervisor or something all system admins would want to use.
I really do not know. For me, it took a full year to wrap my head around what all (basically), Plan9 does - part of that was based on time spent and interest in the topic. Plan9 is
not LINUX, and it really isn't UNIX as we know it. Perhaps, a re-reading of Pikes The UNIX PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT is called for - this does seem to be the sole document that drives
Plan9 (and arguably, 9Fronts) approach to an Operating System.
Stated, of any community that understands Plan9, the BSD crowd appears to be the one that shows the most interest. BSD's philosophical roots coincide with Plan9's. So that part makes
sense to me personally.
At this time, the main focus of 9Front has been to fix what was left of Plan9 when it became open source and to make it relevant - until that stage of the project reaches it's logical
conclusion, I'm unsure if Proven's ideas are going to bear fruit. It may be too soon to start employing 9Front/Plan9 as a solution for business needs. I get where he is coming from,
however, now may not be the time - if ever.
I think for most people reading this document, if you want to approach Plan9, patience is key for gettin a good grasp of the system. Things will start to make sense when one does the
work in their native shells (LINUX/BSD) and then they can contrast what they expect with what Plan9 does. Noticing the differences will help the user make more sense of why Plan9
excels as a UNIX descendant.
9Front appears to run concurrent with goals behind gopher and gemini (also worx for that matter). Philosophically, it just means less is enough or less is more. This goes back to a
known adage that there are two types of internet users, those that work in shells and those that work in browsers. What the end user expects out of the Internet will determine what
environment they are drawn to initially.
I'm running long here on this discussion - so for now, I'll leave my thoughts were they are.
