On 3/10/07, Kris Maglione <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 04:20:22PM -0500, Dan Cross wrote:
>Nonsense. You think rc has never changed before? There have been
>plenty of non-backwards compatible changes in Plan 9.
You miss the point entirely. I agree that things shouldn't stay the same
simply for the sake of compatibility. Plan 9 threw away a bunch of UNIX
crud in the begining, and was not set in stone from the begining. I have
no desire to add teletypes and ioctls to be compatible with UNIX.
The point is that rc(1) has been rc since the begining. It's rc
everywhere. If you write an rc script, you can expect it work wherever
you send it. The one infuriating exception which I've run across is the
UNIX port, which I have to worry about being in peoples' PATHs on UNIX,
rather than the Plan 9 version.
If there are to be changes, there's no reason to make those
changes to rc. It would be best to create a new shell that deals with
the shortcomings of rc, rather than adding features and cruft. That is
how UNIX got to be so cruddy to begin with. The reason that sh(1) and
Plan 9 are so nice is because they reevaluated and threw away most of
what came before them.
No, I didn't miss the point, which, if carried to its logical
conclusion would imply that we should just write a new operating
system whenever we want to add something new. There's nothing set in
stone about any system; the problems you describe come when people
start believing that there is. The proliferation of shells under Unix
could have been avoided by carefully re-evaluating the existing offers
and making appropriate changes. Instead, we ended up with Shell Soup.
Rc is just a program; yes, a pretty good one, but it is not a
religious document: it is open to interpretation, re-evaluation and
change.
Put another way, one of the reasons Plan 9 has remained so nice over
the years is because the folks primary responsible for it have been
open to making reasonable changes where appropriate.
>>It runs on Inferno, which runs on Plan 9. You can script for Plan 9 in
>>Inferno's sh. You can even script for UNIX in it. I've done both. It
>>works. It's not even ugly.
Then perhaps, as has been said for ages, it is best to make the
integration between Inferno and Plan 9 more seemless, and the
installation easier. It would, indeed, be nice to include Inferno in
Plan 9 by default.
You're replying to yourself there.
- Dan C.
