John Floren wrote: > I probably didn't read the iosrv and hubfs stuff well enough, but > multi-pipes are not like gnu screen--unless hubfs and/or iosrv can > do barriers and reduces and I just missed that part?
The connection to screen is really only in usage. Iosrv and Hubfs were the result of trying to give myself persistent rc shells in Plan 9. Because of the absence of the TTY layer, it seemed like the thing to do was to buffer and multiplex each file descriptor of a shell, and allow multiple clients to connect to those buffers. Even though this architecture was created for keeping persistent rc shells around, I realized that it was actually a very beautiful general purpose extension of the original unix pipes, and could be used for a large number of purposes, including cluster processing type applications. So the connection to screen is not "technical" at all - just that the main purpose I wrote iosrv/hubfs for (and btw hubfs is vastly superior to iosrv for practical use if anyone is interested) was to keep persistent rc shells around on remote machines for analogous usage to screen. Anyway, I think multipipes/hubs/pipemuxers are just a good idea for Plan 9 (and probably standard unixes too) and that they fit beautifully with 9P and the whole system. I'd like to move forward with trying to make good Plan 9 software and not have this particular little patent kerfuffle turn into anything majorly disruptive. Ben Kidwell "mycroftiv" -Who would rather go back to trying to explain ANTS and hoping that other Plan 9 users would take an interest and explore it.
