from:"sirjofri"

15.05.2024 17:04:56 Don Bailey :
> Yeah that's the thing, the few of us that have been around for 20 years 
> enjoyed the discussion as much as the engineering. But the discussion was 
> always around what to/not to do and how to do it. I was probably the biggest 
> outsider, as my career prior to diving into Plan 9 was classical violin. I 
> brought an art mindset to an engineering ecosystem and used the opportunity 
> to learn as much as I could from the Plan 9 guys, who I definitely considered 
> my engineering heroes (and still do). I'll never forget the side 
> conversations with jmk about how to go about testing kernel code and him 
> bringing me "back down to Earth". One of many little encounters that honestly 
> have made me into a much more refined engineer today. Albeit, with still 
> quite a ways to grow :-) 

I always enjoy when people work with the system, and not only "on" it. Having 
actual users make most sense to me. I mean, it's an operating system. Having 
users from non-dev side (like sl, who's a writer) is also great.

That discussion type you describe is something I can see on the 9front mailing 
list and the 9fans discord. I really hope 9fans can turn back to that state 
eventually.

> I think it may just be harder for us "old heads" to understand how to fit in 
> with the modern communication style here. And I don't say this to be fiery or 
> disrespectful, but a lot of the discussions come off paranoid and 
> inflammatory while simultaneously accusing everyone *else* of being quite the 
> same. It's very strange and is a big reason a lot of people have left or just 
> choose to lurk.

That's why I like to end messages with the most neutral smiley I can find. And 
I also try to read messages that way. Text can be rude, and I often enough find 
myself reading a text message in a discussion thread like a shakespeare 
program: arguing, fighting. However, the writer almost never intended to mean 
that!

I also sometimes miss the fidonet messaging style. As far as I could experience 
it, it was always friendly and constructive.

> That said, I have been excited by the developments in the 9front and 9legacy, 
> etc, groups, even if I don't fully agree with all the decision making. It at 
> least means people are still interested in building, and that's a good 
> start... 

Agreeing is not necessary. There are many topics where we don't have to agree 
to be a community. For example, I'd like to see libxml in 9front, but the 
decision makers decided against it. More recently, people wished for fossil to 
come back to 9front, but the decision makers decided against it. Both have 
their reasons, and we can always fork off another fork and begin our own 
distribution, or just have our own local version with our changes.

Another example in the opposite direction: many users use various rio versions 
with theming etc. I don't want that. It's not part of the distribution (with 
very few exceptions), and it's 100% optional.

We don't always have to agree, but as long as we can discuss things in peace 
and exchange information we can still be a community.

sirjofri

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Re: Clarifying Lucio's Additional Requests [Was: Re: [9fans] List of companies that use Plan 9. ]

15.05.2024 16:18:49 Don Bailey :
> This thread is perhaps one of the best examples of the bizarre ecosystem that 
> Plan 9 has evolved (devolved?) into. While I have not always understood Vic's 
> choices, I was, in the past, aware of his /position/ at certain entities... 
> and provided him with security information I hoped was relevant to that 
> position at that time. He has been on the Plan 9 mailing list as long (or 
> longer?) than I have (pre-2002?) and has always written his emails in the 
> fashion he writes them currently.

I didn't know that he's been here for so long. It's sad that you both perceive 
the state of the mailing list community as it is.

I can also totally see that vic is trying to help. I just see that the help 
he's providing in the last few months wasn't very helpful, and it also wasn't 
well perceived by all readers.

However, I can also only judge from my perspective, and I'm only here for a few 
years now.

> Frankly, I don't even understand the point in attacking whether he is or is 
> not "an LLM". He's actually trying to be helpful. Perhaps spending less time 
> trolling everyone you don't understand (and inaccurately presume to be a 
> troll), and instead trying to understand how they purport to add value, is a 
> useful path forward.

I personally consider it a valid move to ask a LLM for help writing mails. It's 
just weird to do that on a mailing list like this. I doubt that vic used an AI 
or anything (I mean, why would he lie).

I can also see one or the other trolling attempt here, and I see only a few 
different reasons for that:

(1) People are tired because they're always reading the same arguments and 
defending themselves for the 1000th time. It's understandable that somw develop 
a trolling tone.

(2) People have fun trolling other people. In my opinion this belongs into 
human communication to some extent, but it shouldn't be endorsed and it should 
only happen in some safe space. On this mailing list, this is sometimes too 
much.

(3) People are trolls. In this case we're out of luck.

> There are other companies using Plan 9 in commercial operations/offerings, 
> but I don't think they care to be a part of whatever this mailing list has 
> become. 

(Still interested in learning about them.)

Sorry, I can't really perceive "whatever this mailing list has become". I'm not 
here for too long, and I probably don't see it as critical as you. I should 
note however that 9fans threads often are either non-existent (the list is very 
silent), half-dead or total drama (as this giga-thread). Compared to the 9front 
mailing list, there's almost only constructive work, feedback, steps forward.

I also notice that there's barely any software development going on here 
(almost no patches, no discussion). Is this because the mailing list evolved 
like that and people don't want to contribute in that environment, or is it the 
reason why it evolved like that?

Funnily enough, the 9fans discord community is very nice, helpful, I can barely 
see any trolling attempt at all (at least I can't remember anything like that).

sirjofri

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Re: Clarifying Lucio's Additional Requests [Was: Re: [9fans] List of companies that use Plan 9. ]

15.05.2024 11:17:46 vic.thac...@fastmail.fm:
> Not everyone here is uncomfortable, but like you, I'm disappointed in how 
> interactions have turned out, so we have that in common. I respond to 
> empirical evidence, so I mentioned the concern about submitting feature and 
> bug requests because it seemed that it would benefit Lucio and others. There 
> is nothing wrong with helping others and setting expectations. I don't 
> understand why that would be a problem. Clarity is better than 
> misunderstanding.

In this specific case, I think it was a misunderstanding on your side. Lucio 
mentioned a problem and asked for solutions. You understood it as a bug report 
that was not obviously flagged as a bug report. Lucio clearly stated in the 
last mail that he didn't ask for anything. He was merely asking about some 
problem he had. In my opinion that's a big difference.

Read also this: https://fqa.9front.org/fqa2.html#2.4

> It is possible you simply don’t know what you’re doing. If you do not 
> understand how something is done in 9front or how it works, and can’t figure 
> out how to resolve the problem using the manual pages, [...]
> Regarding my writing style, it is shaped by years of government service and 
> an M.A. degree. I understand that my style may be unusual. Before posting, I 
> make an effort to revise my responses for clarity, which can result in longer 
> messages. We can blame grammarly.com for some word choices as well.

I understand that. That's also one of the reasons why my mails are usually so 
long. Keep in mind though that people here are reading mails because they want 
to, and they all try to understand them.

I'm reminded of a friend who's working for the German government. He was 
sending out a mail with a spreadsheet to some colleague with the wish to fill 
it out. That colleague asked back multiple times: first, if that mail was sent 
to her on purpose and if she's the correct recipient. Second, if she is 
supposed to fill out that spreadsheet. Third, if she should fill out that one 
specific column that is described as "please fill out this column". Those 
people aren't here on this mailing list, but I would totally understand 
extremely verbose (-v) mails like yours if you managed people like that for 
many years!

I'm glad I don't have a job like that...

sirjofri

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Re: Clarifying Lucio's Additional Requests [Was: Re: [9fans] List of companies that use Plan 9. ]

Hey vic,

There are a few different issues I see with your mails:

First and most obvious, they sound like they're generated by some LLM (playing 
captain obvious here). People don't like to see this, it might be related to 
some language barrier. That impression is also supported by the content.

Which leads to the second point: the content of your mails make me feel like 
you feel the urge/need to help. While help is generally appreciated, it 
depends. If you can only help by organizing stuff then organizing "the one 
single plan 9 system" doesn't lead to anything because that doesn't exist. 
9legacy and 9front are both organized by their contributors, who all work for 
free. No money, no demands, no big organization that tells them what to do. It 
would be better if you find another way to help, preferably one that doesn't 
incorporate mails so long that nobody wants to read them with content that 
nobody wants to know.

It is generally fine to share patches and also bug reports to the mailing lists 
(yes there's a separate 9front mailing list for 9front topics). For 9front, 
there's even a section in the fqa about bug reports. Note that all bug reports 
suck in some way, and people who work on the systems do it for free. Also, not 
all apparent bugs are bugs, so keep using plan 9 systems until you understand 
how it is supposed to work (or ask).

In general, the people on our mailing lists know how to work with each other. 
You'll occasionally see discussion about patches (especially on 9front), as 
well as about other topics. There are also other channels of communication 
(irc, mostly). Be assured that people communicate with each other, as far as 
they are willing to. I've never seen so much interaction between 9front and 
9legacy as in the last few years.

Other than that, your mails often enough just state the obvious. People read 
between the lines to understand what the person means. This sometimes fails to 
work, but that's just part of human communication. Your ability to summarize a 
mailing list thread about three different topics into a list of 7 user story 
action points is not well perceived, which I can rotally understand: it doesn't 
help anyone.

My advice would be (not sure if it helps):

Write your mails. Write them, don't send them. Read them again carefully and 
think about the people reading it. They most likely understand as much as you, 
and they have all the track record of earlier discussions, so they very likely 
understand more than you. Things are as they are for a reason. Not always for a 
good reason, but for a reason. After thinking about your mail and the 
recipient, you may revise/rewrite your mail or just throw it away.

Last, we're not a company. People who do the work are the ones organizing. 
Those people don't like to see strangers organizing their stuff without any 
contribution. If you can write software, try to organize yourself and give 
something back to the community. Hunt for bugs and fix them, or write tools 
that helps people, or improve the documentation. This should help the community 
much more than top-level organization when there is no top-level.

I hope this mail finds you well, please read it with some smile. I don't want 
to hurt anyone, and text can be rude sometimes.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Balancing Progress and Accessibility in the Plan 9 Community. (Was: [9fans] Interoperating between 9legacy and 9front)

2024-05-13 Thread sirjofri

13.05.2024 12:12:49 ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:

> On Monday, 13 May 2024, at 11:57 AM, sirjofri wrote:
>> So, you could say, plan 9 from bell labs is the last released version, 4th 
>> edition. The others (9legacy, 9front, ...) are also plan 9, just not plan 9 
>> from bell labs.
>
> I personally prefer to call my fork based on plan9. I didn't write or invent 
> plan9. Nor is my version a replacement or a continuation of plan9 it is fork 
> based on plan9.

I guess that's the difference in nomenclature. For me, a plan9 system is a 
system in the spirit of plan 9 from bell labs, using the concepts described in 
the papers and implemented in the bellabs sources. Similar to unix, which 
includes all the unices.

For you, plan9 is explicitly plan 9 from bell labs.

I don't think any of those definitions is "wrong" because there's no official 
definition. But I believe that we have to talk about the different systems 
using words. If I think about grouping operating systems based on concepts, we 
have all the doses, all the windowses, all the unices, and then (based on your 
definition) "plan 9 and forks of plan 9".

For me, it's "all plan9 systems", which includes belllabs plan9, 9legacy, 
9front and so on. That's one of the reasons I name 9front "a plan9 system", not 
"the plan9 system", because there are a few different distributions/forks.

> On Monday, 13 May 2024, at 11:57 AM, sirjofri wrote:
>> And if people want just a continuation of the concepts (the concepts which 
>> are commonly understood as "plan 9"), 9front is also one of those 
>> continuations, same as 9legacy or any other fork that tries to live those 
>> concepts.
> As I said before I view 9front as one fork of plan9 and one I'm respecting. 
> You do a good job and people who use your fork surely benefit from your work.

I wish I contributed more. I once tried to get at least one mention per 9front 
release, but that didn't work out.

Again, I think it's just different wording we use for "plan9 (systems)".

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Re: [9fans] Balancing Progress and Accessibility in the Plan 9 Community. (Was: [9fans] Interoperating between 9legacy and 9front)

2024-05-13 Thread sirjofri

So, with that definition, the system described in the paper "Plan 9 from bell 
labs" is not plan9, because it describes any system that uses the same concepts?

So, plan9 is like UNIX™ and there's no such thing as a concept about plan 9?

Note that 9front never claimed to be a continuation, but a fork. The people who 
desperately cry for a continuation of plan 9 either claim 9front as a 
continuation, or explicitly not.

People who want a continuation of plan 9 missed the train a long time ago. 
There won't be an official continuation of plan 9, and that's a fact, because 
p9f won't do it.

It's not the devs who claim a continuation of plan9, it's the people asking for 
it.

And if people want just a continuation of the concepts (the concepts which are 
commonly understood as "plan 9"), 9front is also one of those continuations, 
same as 9legacy or any other fork that tries to live those concepts.

So, you could say, plan 9 from bell labs is the last released version, 4th 
edition. The others (9legacy, 9front, ...) are also plan 9, just not plan 9 
from bell labs.

Similar to how UNIX™ is a unix, as is any linux system, bsd and mac.

13.05.2024 11:23:16 ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:

>> I would make a big difference between what plan 9 is and what the licenses 
>> are. Software doesn't care about licenses. People do (and they should!).
>> 
>> So what is plan 9 even? Can we compare it to UNIX™ or unix or posix? Who 
>> knows...
>> 
>> I guess I could say a lot more about that topic, but I guess that's enough 
>> and you can puzzle everything else yourself.
> 
> plan9 is simply the final release made by bell labs and now owned by p9f. 
> Thats not my interpretation this is a fact. Everything beyond that point is a 
> fork based on plan9. 
> 
> Everyone is allowed to derive his/her work from this provided version of 
> plan9.
> 
> 9front is a fork, 9legacy is a fork and there were other forks. I have my own 
> fork. If tomorrow another one decides to fork plan9 than thats okay.
> 
> 9front isn't plan9. 9front is a fork based on plan9. Why is it that you can't 
> accept this fact. You aren't the owners of plan9 and you don't  even own the 
> trademark plan9.
> 
> Your fork is called 9front and its absolutely okay to fork from code with a 
> license that allows this.
> 
> Your fork based on plan9 is extremely close to the original. But that doesn't 
> mean you are the continuation of plan9.
> 
> The only thing we can agree on as fork developers is what is officially 
> called plan9 as a basement for exchange of code ideas aso. Code that can be 
> compiled and executed on the official release is one that can be exchanged.
> 
> There is only one group on this messaging board which has a problem with this 
> definition of plan9 thats 9front. You insist on being seen as the 
> continuation of plan9 but you aren't. You could have become this by buying 
> plan9 from nokia and the trademark or nokia could have chosen you to hand it 
> over to you but they didn't. p9f owns plan9 and if they ever decide to hand 
> it over to you than you become officially the owner and continuation of plan9 
> but this won't change the fact that meanwhile others have forked from plan9 
> and call themselves fork xyz based on plan9 and you to respect this.
> 
> Why is it so difficult for folks of 9front to accept that they are providing 
> a fork based on plan9.
> 
>> [1] (I would be very careful with such bold words. I feel like 9front people 
>> have heard this phrase a lot and it's probably very thin ice for a few 
>> people.)
>> 
> 
> And so what ? Compared to the replies of some folks from 9front regarding 
> simple questions there is nothing bold about my statements. This is 9fans and 
> if you start the same discussions over and over again than you have to live 
> with answers like mine. Neither you nor I own plan9 while people outside 
> 9front have no problem with facts you have this problem. You can't just 
> accept the fact that 9front is a fork like many others. You may do a good job 
> for your users and many enjoy using 9front as stated many times here on this 
> board but but you do your job others do their job and you are in no position 
> to give directions to others. I respect your work continue with it but don't 
> act as if you are the ones who are in possession of plan9 or can dictate 
> directions you can't and I also can't. I'm fed up with the regularly disputes 
> you search with people who don't want to use your fork. I'm not using it and 
> nothing will change my mind.
> 
>> About another topic: you mentioned that plan 9 is in use for commercial 
>> products, and you explicitly mention german medical sensors. I've never 
>> heard about that and I'd like to learn more, as well as about other 
>> companies who actually use plan 9.
>> 
>> Everything I always hear in the industry is that plan 9 is outdated and 
>> nobody uses it and nobody wants to hear about it. I only know of a single 
>> company that uses

Re: [9fans] Balancing Progress and Accessibility in the Plan 9 Community. (Was: [9fans] Interoperating between 9legacy and 9front)

2024-05-13 Thread sirjofri

Hey all,

Just about one topic mentioned by ibrahim:

You mentioned that 9front can't be plan 9 in your perspective because of this 
licensing and the "origin" of the licensing.

> 9front isn't plan9 from my perspective. Plan 9 is the final release with 
> patches for the files from sources I can be sure that those aren't taken from 
> open source projects by copy and paste.
[1]

I would make a big difference between what plan 9 is and what the licenses are. 
Software doesn't care about licenses. People do (and they should!).

So what is plan 9 even? Can we compare it to UNIX™ or unix or posix? Who 
knows...

I guess I could say a lot more about that topic, but I guess that's enough and 
you can puzzle everything else yourself.

[1] (I would be very careful with such bold words. I feel like 9front people 
have heard this phrase a lot and it's probably very thin ice for a few people.)

---

About another topic: you mentioned that plan 9 is in use for commercial 
products, and you explicitly mention german medical sensors. I've never heard 
about that and I'd like to learn more, as well as about other companies who 
actually use plan 9.

Everything I always hear in the industry is that plan 9 is outdated and nobody 
uses it and nobody wants to hear about it. I only know of a single company that 
uses it (coraid), plus a few little projects by taw that could evolve into 
commercial products.

I sometimes thought about building a list of companies that use plan 9 
technology, just so people can get involved with them, and now that I'm 
searching for a new job that's even more interesting for me personally. (Not 
sure if I want to do plan 9 as $dayjob, but I could see it as an option.) That 
topic should end up in a new thread however (or even a DM).

sirjofri

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[9fans] 9p.zone no longer available

2024-03-11 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

as some of you might have noticed already, 9p.zone is basically dead.

To be more precise, we lost the domain and will start shutting down servers 
soon. We're still figuring out what to keep (and how).

In the meantime, the deepest core of 9p.zone - the chat - is available at 
chat.only9fans.com, and it'll probably stay there.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Content of your /rc/bin/service or /dis/svc ?

2024-03-06 Thread sirjofri

06.03.2024 11:36:39 Edouard Klein :

>
> sirjofri  writes:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> 05.03.2024 22:38:59 Edouard Klein :
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Thank you for your answer.
>>>
>>>
>>> sirjofri  writes:
>>>
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I don't use /rc/bin/service anymore, but I use /cfg/machinename/service 
>>>> instead. My contents are copies of what's in /rc/bin/service or my own 
>>>> scripts:
>>>
>>> I assume that you then bind-mount /cfg/machinename/service to that
>>> machine's /rc/bin/service ?
>>
>> Nope, because bind would only change my own namespace (or I have to bind it 
>> becore aux/listen starts).
>>
>> In fact, it's much easier. I don't know if it's a 9front feature or if it's 
>> also
>> in plan 9, but if there is a /cfg/$sysname/service directory it will use that
>> instead of /rc/bin/service (see the cpurc file,
>> https://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/36478171be59721dcc5252043fe2955cb37fc9b3/rc/bin/cpurc/f.html
>> ).
>>
> Thanks, I had missed it because there is no /cfg in the source. Do you
> happen to know how the /cfg dir is first populated during install ? Is
> it all hand-written by the user ?

I think it is all hand-written, yes. Take a look at cpurc and what the options 
are. Most notably, the service directory, cpustart, and the plan9.ini file for 
tftp booting (iirc, I never tried it).

>> If you think about how plan 9 should run on a network, imagine a single fs 
>> with
>> many cpu servers all using the same fs. All the configuration is on the fs, 
>> and
>> the service directories are in the /cfg/machinename/service. The cpu servers
>> will run their individual configuration automatically using that mechanism. 
>> It
>> just makes sense.
>>
>
> Indeed it does.
>
>>>>
>>>> tcp80 - web server
>>>> tcp443 - web server but wrapped in tls
>>>> ...
>>>>
>>>> I have some cifd running, some irc server that translates to grid chat, my 
>>>> mail
>>>> server (smtp and imap4), and fingerd, the files follow the usual scheme 
>>>> tcpXXX.
>>>> I probably missed one service or the other, but aux/listen is simple 
>>>> enough to
>>>> set up custom servers with arbitrary functionality.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Would you mind sharing your fingerd and irc server ? For finger my plan
>>> is to turn this one:
>>> https://github.com/michael-lazar/finger2020/blob/master/finger2020 into
>>> a multi-user version, but if there already is one I won't bother.
>>
>> Sure, here it is:
>>
>> https://shithub.us/sirjofri/fingerd/HEAD/info.html
>>
>> Note that I got some notice of potential .. path issues and I'm not sure if I
>> fixed that, but just in case, you might want to fix that (and maybe send me a
>> patch). Fix could be as easy as a newns or what it is in C.
>>
>
> I'll try to compile it on Linux and will let you know :)

Well, it's designed for plan 9 systems, so you're probably out of luck on 
linux, except you try it with plan9ports.

While we're talking about finger, I wrote some simple android app called 
"FingerList" some time ago (on F-droid). It displays a list of fingers in a 
list format, it's intended for micro social networking with status pages and 
whatever people want to use it for.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Content of your /rc/bin/service or /dis/svc ?

2024-03-05 Thread sirjofri

Hi,

05.03.2024 22:38:59 Edouard Klein :

> Hi,
>
> Thank you for your answer.
>
>
> sirjofri  writes:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I don't use /rc/bin/service anymore, but I use /cfg/machinename/service 
>> instead. My contents are copies of what's in /rc/bin/service or my own 
>> scripts:
>
> I assume that you then bind-mount /cfg/machinename/service to that
> machine's /rc/bin/service ?

Nope, because bind would only change my own namespace (or I have to bind it 
becore aux/listen starts).

In fact, it's much easier. I don't know if it's a 9front feature or if it's 
also in plan 9, but if there is a /cfg/$sysname/service directory it will use 
that instead of /rc/bin/service (see the cpurc file, 
https://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/36478171be59721dcc5252043fe2955cb37fc9b3/rc/bin/cpurc/f.html
 ).

If you think about how plan 9 should run on a network, imagine a single fs with 
many cpu servers all using the same fs. All the configuration is on the fs, and 
the service directories are in the /cfg/machinename/service. The cpu servers 
will run their individual configuration automatically using that mechanism. It 
just makes sense.

>>
>> tcp80 - web server
>> tcp443 - web server but wrapped in tls
>> ...
>>
>> I have some cifd running, some irc server that translates to grid chat, my 
>> mail
>> server (smtp and imap4), and fingerd, the files follow the usual scheme 
>> tcpXXX.
>> I probably missed one service or the other, but aux/listen is simple enough 
>> to
>> set up custom servers with arbitrary functionality.
>>
>
> Would you mind sharing your fingerd and irc server ? For finger my plan
> is to turn this one:
> https://github.com/michael-lazar/finger2020/blob/master/finger2020 into
> a multi-user version, but if there already is one I won't bother.

Sure, here it is:

https://shithub.us/sirjofri/fingerd/HEAD/info.html

Note that I got some notice of potential .. path issues and I'm not sure if I 
fixed that, but just in case, you might want to fix that (and maybe send me a 
patch). Fix could be as easy as a newns or what it is in C.

>> If you have exact questions about aux/listen functionality or you don't 
>> understand something, just ask :)
>>
>
> - I noticed some tcpXXX files use exec for their last line, and some
> don't. Is there a reason ? My understanding is that exec saves one call
> to fork per connection, and thus it would be best if it was always used.

There might be some difference, maybe with log redirectors or something, but I 
don't know about that. I guess someone else can tell us more about this (and 
the following topic, which is very similar)

> - I noticed Inferno makes great use of servers that speak 9P on their
>   stdstream, with its
>   mount {some-program} /mnt/toto
>   These programs are trivial to expose thanks to listen:
>    listen -v 'tcp!*!toto' {some-program&}
>   On Plan9, I ran into rc's cmd <[0=1] | echo 0 > /srv/name, then mount
>   /srv/name /n/toto.
>   - Is there a inferno-like shorthand for Plan 9 ?
>   - Why the "echo 0" ? (I'm not familiar with rc).
>
>> Btw it's quite common to "deactivate" services by renaming the files to have 
>> a
>> leading "!". In general, everything that follows the naming scheme
>>  and is executable will work.
>>
> why not just chmod -x them ? In a multiuser system, users may not have
> the right to rename them.

I think that _would_ work, but I think it's about readability in this case. I 
can just lc in that directory and immediately see what's relevant and what not. 
With executable flag I have to run ls -l to see what's executable, and it's 
also harder to parse it (sorting and filtering). A simple ! is easier to read, 
and also probably more stable in case of copying files via different filesystem 
types (like, copying the file to fat32 and back, or even having a filesystem 
without executable flags, which often results in all files bein executable).

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Content of your /rc/bin/service or /dis/svc ?

2024-03-02 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

I don't use /rc/bin/service anymore, but I use /cfg/machinename/service 
instead. My contents are copies of what's in /rc/bin/service or my own scripts:

tcp80 - web server
tcp443 - web server but wrapped in tls
...

I have some cifd running, some irc server that translates to grid chat, my mail 
server (smtp and imap4), and fingerd, the files follow the usual scheme tcpXXX. 
I probably missed one service or the other, but aux/listen is simple enough to 
set up custom servers with arbitrary functionality.

If you have exact questions about aux/listen functionality or you don't 
understand something, just ask :)

Btw it's quite common to "deactivate" services by renaming the files to have a 
leading "!". In general, everything that follows the naming scheme 
 and is executable will work.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] dd(1) takes very long

2024-03-01 Thread sirjofri

01.03.2024 11:38:06 Steve simon :

> A larger block size as lucio says, and also try two dd's with a pipe between 
> them,
> one reading and one writing. dd(1) is single threaded but you have two 
> asynchronous physical devices.

You can probably even pipe it through some compressor, but I doubt you'll get 
much performance out of it in a case like this (local machine). I guess it's 
more useful for separate machines with slower network connections.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Formation of a Plan 9 Core Team

2024-01-26 Thread sirjofri

26.01.2024 10:49:42 Frank D. Engel, Jr. :

> From my perspective, Plan 9 was split into two forks: 9legacy for people who 
> don't want it to move forward but simply to be maintained, and 9front for 
> people who want the project to move forward and continue to grow.
> 
> Having a core team for "Plan 9" at this point would be kind of pointless as 
> the name was a real product at one time but now encompasses a collection of 
> related forks of what was once a product, so such a team would need to form 
> around one particular fork.
> 
> Having a core team basically expresses the goal of moving the project 
> forward, so if a core team were to form right now, it would be for 9front, or 
> around a new fork with a similar set of common ideals (maybe we move on to 
> Plan 10?), since moving forward is kind of the antithesis of what 9legacy 
> seems to be about.

That sounds about right. Basically everything you said.

Any attempt to release an official new edition of Plan 9 would be a fork.

I personally think it is ok for 9legacy to just maintain the original version 
and not move the project forward. I think 9front tries to stay as compatible as 
possible at runtime (so same binary formats, same protocols, basically Plan 9 
4th "plus").

What OP wants might include breaking changes that break compatibility on some 
system layers. Probably not on a level of protocols or something, but 
filesystems might change, probably a complete new window manager, graphics 
acceleration, a different plumber and lots and lots of more "modern" software 
(anyone wanna port firefox or chrome? ;) ). That might really be a Plan 10 at 
some point.

I very much believe that this should be a fork, probably with some kinda 
package manager to make larger parts optional. Not everyone needs everything. 
Plan 9 as it is right now can include many things without asking, because 
they're so small. Imagine bundling a 100M graphics driver with Plan 9, 
including the source! No, thanks.

Back to topic with some question to the OP (and please, please, don't take it 
personally or something): Is it possible that you want to contribute to Plan 9 
but don't know where to start? I remember, when I started with Plan 9, I wanted 
to improve many things, contribute everything I could, until I realized that 
many things are like they are on purpose. I was often grounded by people like 
ori, hiro, mycroftiv, kvik and a few others on grid, as well as cat-v. I 
learned that being part of Plan 9 does not necessarily mean contributing large 
chunks of code, or changing many things to be "better" (whatever better means).

sirjofri

P.S.: sorry Frank, I clicked the wrong reply button. Of course this should go 
to the mailing list.

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Re: [9fans] Formation of a Plan 9 Core Team

2024-01-26 Thread sirjofri

Hello again,

26.01.2024 09:08:29 Vester "Vic" Thacker :
> When looking at the FreeBSD project, the introduction of a Plan 9 Core Team 
> can offer several benefits:
>
> 1. *Centralized Technical Leadership*: A Core Team can provide clear 
> technical leadership and direction for the project. This ensures that 
> development efforts are coordinated, focused, and aligned with the project's 
> goals.

There currently is no project 5e. That's why there's no need for a core team, 
but people to start the project.

> 2. *Consistency and Stability*: With a dedicated Core Team, there is a better 
> chance of maintaining consistency and stability in the development process. 
> This can lead to more reliable and predictable updates.

This will happen somewhat automatically once people are there who do the work. 
There's no need for an official core team.

> 3. *Efficient Decision-Making*: The Core Team can streamline decision-making 
> processes, especially for critical technical decisions. This can help avoid 
> delays and conflicts that might arise in a more decentralized development 
> model.
>
> 4. *Attracting Contributors*: Having a well-defined leadership structure can 
> make the project more attractive to potential contributors, as they can see a 
> clear path for their contributions and how they can impact the project's 
> direction.

Who/What attracts the attractors?

People will join when it's attractive to join. What do you offer to the core 
team besides your vision?

> 5. *Community Cohesion*: A Core Team can act as a unifying force within the 
> community, bringing together contributors from various Plan 9 distributions 
> and projects. It fosters collaboration and cooperation.
>
> 6. *Long-Term Sustainability*: By focusing on technical governance, a Core 
> Team can help ensure the long-term sustainability of the project, making it 
> less reliant on the efforts of a single individual or a small group.
>
> 7. *Representation*: The Core Team can include representatives from different 
> Plan 9 distributions, ensuring that various voices and perspectives are 
> considered in the decision-making process.
>
> 8. *Resource Allocation*: The Core Team can allocate resources more 
> efficiently, directing efforts towards areas that are most critical to the 
> project's success.

There are no resources yet that should be directed. I can only see a vision and 
you who offers the vision. Do you also offer other resources like code?

> 9. *Enhanced Documentation*: With a centralized team, there's often a better 
> opportunity to maintain and improve project documentation, making it easier 
> for newcomers to understand and contribute to the project.

That needs people who do the work.

> 10. *Fostering Innovation*: A Core Team can actively promote innovation and 
> new features, driving the evolution of the Plan 9 operating system in a 
> direction that aligns with the community's needs and goals.


As you can see in the inline responses, you first need people who do the work. 
Without that, there's no need (and also no opportunity) to build a core team.

You can, however, start yourself and wait for people to join. Be the core and 
don't just wait for the core.

You can even build a company and hire people to get things started faster. But 
that again needs resources: money.

Note that I'm not opposed to your general vision. There are many very good 
aspects in there. I just can't envision that in an official 5e release, but in 
another fork (maybe of an existing fork). I personally would think it's best to 
built upon 9front, because they have good hardware support already. And there's 
many great ideas in that bubble, some of them get rejected.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Formation of a Plan 9 Core Team

2024-01-26 Thread sirjofri

Hey Vic,

I followed the other thread and read through your initial mail. Here's my 
thoughts.

I don't think the development of another mainline release or the formation of a 
core team really makes sense. A core team is built around a solid vision and 
the ability (and want) to follow that.

My suggestion is, you just start building your own distribution based on your 
vision and people can join. I just doubt that this will end up being 5e, 
especially because there's nobody who's willing to give it a 5e stamp.

That said, we have "official" plan 9 releases: 4th is "officially" 4th, 9front 
is "officially" 9front, and 9legacy is "officially" 9legacy. It's ok to let 
history be and start building new stuff based on what happened in the past 15 
years instead of building on a state 15 years ago and hoping for a magical 
stamp to give you an "official" branding.

People don't care if they're using an "official" system. People use linux, 
which is not unix. People use 9front, which is not plan 9. Many good things 
started as forks, and that's ok.

Forming a core team is like forcing people into a vision without a base. Maybe 
they'll start, but there's no guarantee. It's more likely they'll just leave 
and that was it.

If you take a look at FreeBSD, they started more or less as something like 
9legacy, and they continued to be 9legacy. They never were "official" 386BSD, 
they even looked for another name, which ended up being "FreeBSD".

I'll write another mail as response to your new mail.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] iwp9 paper submission ?

2023-11-08 Thread sirjofri

27.10.2023 18:40:51 o...@eigenstate.org:
> Short summary -- we're working on it. It's likely to be at a different
> location than we had initially announced. We're waiting to confirm
> before we put out the call for papers and specific dates.

Are there any news on that?

If there are bigger issues with the location, I could ask my local university, 
just let me know.

> It will be happening.

That's definitely good to hear. 

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[9fans] Survey: touch user interfaces and plan 9

2023-09-08 Thread sirjofri

Hello community,

I'm writing a paper about touch user interfaces and Plan 9 and need your help. 
I prepared a few questions and it would be great if you can answer them and/or 
forward to other people who might be interested in helping out.

To answer, it's easiest to send me a mail (sirjo...@sirjofri.de). You can just 
click reply, but make sure to _not_ send the answer to any mailing list! That 
would be weird... Inline answers are preferred :)

Also, please don't hesitate to participate if you're very new to Plan 9. I have 
a question about that, too, and if you're unsure you can just skip the question.

I'm pretty sure you can be done within 5-10 minutes if you want, but it's very 
hard to estimate the time because you can add as much text (and details) as you 
want.

Thank you (questions below)

sirjofri



Before going into the questions, feel free to add more details to your answers. 
You're _not_ bound to the predefined answers!

Please rate your level of experience with Plan 9 (0 - just started using it, 
everything is new to me; 10 - I write kernel code and use the system daily)

Please tell me how important the following features are for your personal user 
experience. Give them weighted values from 0 (not important) to 5 (very 
important).
- namespaces
- plumber (including integration of plumber)
- text interface (rio window, shell)
- the GUI in general (are you a pure text guru?)
- mouse interaction (chording, etc.)
- others (tell me/add them to the list)

Do you prefer ultra-text-based systems like acme, sam, shell, or purely 
widget-based systems like fgui, mothra?

When you think about computer systems with touchscreen interfaces, about which 
of the following systems do you think immediately? Tell me more about your 
thoughts of the others.
- very small screen: smart watch
- small screen: smart phone
- standalone big screen: tablet
- mixed big screen: desktop computer with mouse/keyboard in combination with a 
touch screen
- others: for example, big whiteboard, media table

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Re: [9fans] Public Access 9front systems

2023-06-12 Thread sirjofri



12.06.2023 21:41:47 Stanley Lieber :
>
> http://9p.sdf.org/

In addition to that, there's also a (probably much smaller and less 
professional) public 9front system at 9p.zone using the EXTRA services. It has 
fs.eu.9p.zone and access to two cpus (though one is considered experimental). 
It wants some admin love and more grids in other countries besides eu. (Note 
that I'm part of 9p.zone and the (paying) admin behind eu.9p.zone.)

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] wctl

2023-05-09 Thread sirjofri



09.05.2023 15:04:07 有澤健治 :

> Thanks for umbraticus and Richard.
>
> The value 72 is experimentally OK.
> However I am not convinced yet.
> I can't find the value in the manual.

Not experimentally. According to rio(4), it's 4 values padded to 12 chars, plus 
the window state as two strings, also padded to 12. If you do the math: 6*12=72.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Script to apply Edit commands in acme

2023-01-16 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

the shebang (#!/bin/rc) just says which shell you want to run it. You could 
also use /bin/ed, if you want to run ed commands, for example.

Acme can do pretty crazy stuff to extend it. For example, you can write your 
own scripts (or programs) in any language you like. Middle-click can execute 
simple programs with no magic. See also /acme/ folder for examples.

There can be simple programs like spell checkers that are just scripts using 
the file path as parameters, and there are more complex programs that actually 
use the acme filesystem to do crazy stuff. For example, you can adjust the 
buffer as you like, write into the tag line whatever you like, capture mouse 
input in the tag line and do whatever you like, oben new acme windows, 

For your specific question about Edit commands, I don't know of a way. However, 
if there is a way I'm sure you can find it in the man pages.

What could work though, is running ssam (or sam) on the data file in your acme 
filesystem. It just exposes an interface for each of your acme windows with a 
few files to control it.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] discord invite link (was: sirjofri's Annual Christmas (and New-Year) Post)

2022-12-27 Thread sirjofri

I dunno. Most focused discussions happen on the mailing lists anyway.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] discord invite link (was: sirjofri's Annual Christmas (and New-Year) Post)

2022-12-26 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

sure, here's a link that shouldn't expire: https://discord.gg/R8ra7QwNs3

It's the 9fans discord channel, which is probably not as official as it may 
sound.

sirjofri

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[9fans] sirjofri's Annual Christmas (and New-Year) Post

2022-12-26 Thread sirjofri

Hello my dear community, it's time for my annual christmas (and new-year) post!

This is for you, if you celebrate christmas or not, so please keep reading if 
you want.

The sad thing first, I wasn't as active as I wanted to be, so I don't really 
know what happened across all communities in-depth in the last year. For me 
personally it was quite a stressful year due to my job and the fact that I 
married in september. As some of you probably know, time is different if you 
have a partner; that's something I had to learn this year.

I also learned that I can have many (good) ideas, but I also don't have nearly 
as much time as I should have to invest in them. Therefore, not much code from 
my side, and kudos to all contributors!

Probably the only notable thing I achieved this year (that's also relevant to 
you) is the advent (pun intended) of drawterm-android in the fdroid store, 
again, combined with only little time to improve it.

I recognized a few new faces in the various community channels. Mostly on 
discord, but also on the mailing lists, as well as adventuresin9, who regularly 
posts new videos about lower level topics around Plan 9. Welcome to all of you 
guys!

I wish you all a very merry christmas, hopefully with your families or other 
persons that are close to you. I wish for you that you and your important 
people stay healthy in these weird times with covid and weather and war. I wish 
for you all that you can keep or achieve peace with your relatives, and that 
you can start the new year with peace and love and friendship.

Christmas is about god being with us, so may god be with you all and bless you!

sirjofri

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[9fans] ChatGPT story about glenda

2022-12-23 Thread sirjofri

Prompt: Can you write a short fictional story about glenda, the Plan 9 bunny, 
and her adventures in an unknown filesystem?


The Story™ (unedited)

Glenda was a curious little bunny who lived in the land of Plan 9. One day, 
while exploring the vast expanse of her home filesystem, she stumbled upon a 
strange and unknown directory.

Intrigued, Glenda ventured inside, hopping from file to file and exploring the 
strange and mysterious contents within. As she delved deeper into the unknown 
filesystem, she encountered all sorts of strange and wonderful creatures, from 
chirping file-birds to playful byte-beasts.

Despite the many dangers she faced, Glenda remained brave and determined, 
always seeking out new adventures and discovering new wonders in the unknown 
filesystem. And as she traveled further and further from home, she became more 
and more confident in her ability to navigate and explore this strange and 
mysterious world.

In the end, Glenda returned home to Plan 9 a wiser and more experienced bunny, 
ready to embark on even more exciting adventures in the unknown filesystem. The 
end.

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-12-23 Thread sirjofri



23.12.2022 06:10:07 kokam...@hera.eonet.ne.jp:

> Ok, the remaining problem is the down shift of mouse point.

The mouse offset is a really annoying problem. I hope that it just disappears 
after restructuring the app, otherwise I hope to be able to fix it after that. 
Also I plan to create a fullscreen mode for keyboard and mouse setups.

Native landscape mode is something I already tested and should work quite well 
if it's in.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-12-15 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

yes, drawterm basically always crashes when I try to connect. Then, after a few 
attempts, it finally works. It is very annoying and I want to fix it as soon as 
I restructured the architecture for the future plans (maybe that fixes the 
crashes automatically).

Rotating the screen works fine in most cases, at least on my devices.

Getting rid of the kb button and the checkboxes is planned for the future as 
soon as keyboard and mouse support works stable. Maybe even with a full 
fullscreen mode.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-12-10 Thread sirjofri



10.12.2022 02:14:33 kokam...@hera.eonet.ne.jp:

> I don't see any of this kind of checkbox.
> I only see 'add server' button.

Oh, I see.

The checkbox should be on top of the connection window/viewport next to the kb 
button, but in this version it's not there yet. I have it in a separate repo, 
but I can try to merge that change to the fdroid repo asap. (Asap means, as 
soon as I have time).

Sorry.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-12-08 Thread sirjofri

Good morning,

iirc, hardware keyboard should work out of the box. But I only was able to test 
it with my Bluetooth keyboard on a quite modern device, so it is possible that 
you have issues under certain circumstances.

Regarding mouse, the app only provides some basic mouse usage. You have to 
activate mouse mode in the app using the last checkbox (which basically means, 
ignore all other checkboxes and use mouse input). Furthermore, you can only 
click (mmb, rmb, lmb), but no chording. Again, I was only able to test it on my 
devices with a standard USB mouse via OTG.

Patches are welcome!

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] the practicality of plan 9

2022-11-03 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

just wanted to add that (independent of grids) what's especially great on Plan 
9 is the general concept of "resource abstraction".

Let's first consider what "resource" means in this context, since it can be 
anything: computing resources might be the obvious, but user files are also 
resources, as well as practical abstracted resources from more complex systems 
and processes. Basically anything can be a resource.

On Plan 9, all of these resources can be abstracted as a filesystem, which is 
the common abstraction for all things. Those filesystems are of course network 
ready and there's no type of "special" filesystem unlike on many other 
operating systems (for example, on linux you have some special filesystem that 
manages disk space and that embeds into the OS. On Plan 9 it doesn't matter 
what's under the hood, as long as it talks 9p it's fine).

And since you have fully dynamic namespaces per process basically you can 
control which exact services (as a filesystem) you want to use for your 
specific purpose. You want to use a different network card for your process? 
Just import the filesystem. You want to access another microscope, telescope or 
camera for your image processing software? Just import that filesystem. That's 
not a camera but stored images you captured earlier? Who cares. As long as your 
software doesn't care, just use it.

This also works great with interfaces to hardware or software resources. As 
long as the interface looks the same you can easily exchange a filesystem with 
another. Just build your namespace and do what you want.

And since Plan 9 is fully network ready nobody cares about if the filesystem is 
actually stored on the same machine, a remote machine on the same network, at 
the other end of the world, or just a small arduino that talks 9p over some 
weird infrared signal line some teenager constructed in their basement. It just 
doesn't matter, the system doesn't care.

In my opinion that's where Plan 9 really shines and empowers me to do crazy 
stuff. Of course it's more ideological and philosophical, but it's a great 
perspective to have. And it's more fun to work with it that way.

This is also why I think Plan 9 is very modern. There are many new ideas 
nowadays that you can find within Plan 9 already in a much more elegant way. 
Take alone the plumber, which is an incredible utility. It's simple and you can 
find more "modern" (i.e. complex) solutions on android/ios, windows 10+, mac 
and modern linux environments, but plumber is just more simple and powerful. 
And that's just one example, pretty sure you cam find other examples yourself.

Well, again I just want to add a small little detail that's great but I write a 
long passage. Sorry for the long message.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] the practicality of plan 9

2022-10-30 Thread sirjofri

Hello,

in my opinion (and experience) having a Plan 9 _grid_ is only really beneficial 
for larger networks (where there's a reason to have a separation for load 
balancing or maintenance reasons) or individuals who plan to build services 
with some scale. For others it's mainly playing around to learn those things or 
just because we can.

For example, a standard™ grid really shines with a good fileserver. I mean, 
it's the core of all your files and also the configuration of the other nodes 
in the machine. In an ideal setup you can just reboot an individual service 
node, or even replace it, and it just reboots using the kernel and 
configuration from the fileserver.

Also consider multiple users: each one can have their own terminal with a full 
Plan 9 kernel that's directly connected with the fileserver. You get low 
latency when interacting with the local kernel (e.g when running applications), 
but somewhat higher latency accessing files (including starting programs, 
though you can work around that quite easily). Big benefits are, it doesn't 
matter which terminal you are on, you always get the same interface to your 
resources (files _and_ services inside the grid), but still maintaining good 
speed since everything is running locally.

Well, not everything, since you can obviously off-load heavy tasks to the other 
servers inside your grid. Use your terminal as an interface, but do heavy tasks 
on big clunky machines in your network.

That's just my thoughts.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-10-02 Thread sirjofri



02.10.2022 20:26:54 o...@eigenstate.org:
> very nice -- is there a plan to merge this with the
> drawterm on git.9front.org at some point?

Most things are from echoline's repo (on shithub) which should theoretically be 
mostly in sync already, but I heard some files were missing, for example the 
icons.

When I get a stable version with my changes I'd also notice you so you can 
integrate it.

sirjofri

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[9fans] Drawterm on F-Droid

2022-10-01 Thread sirjofri

Hello all,

I'm happy to inform you that Drawterm (Android) is now listed on the official 
F-Droid android store.

This means, automatically built updates, and you can get the latest version 
without building yourself or asking for an apk, plus one single signed 
certificate.

Get it now: https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.echoline.drawterm/

Have fun

sirjofri

PS: I'm currently working on an improved version with some more stable app 
structure which should give us a few features and allow us to fix a few very 
annoying bugs.

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Re: [9fans] building a grid at university

2022-10-01 Thread sirjofri

Nice, great to know. Any experience with azure then? Would love to try it out.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] building a grid at university

2022-09-30 Thread sirjofri



30.09.2022 12:42:53 Glenn Holmer via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:

> This has always seemed miraculous to me. Can you give an example of the 
> commands?

On 9front:

rimport myserver /net

Communication basically always goes through the network interface present in 
/net (or /net.alt, depending on the software and configuration), so all network 
listeners you run after importing the /net of the server will just start 
listening on the network interface of the server. That's the power of 
namespaces for you.

Iirc with listen(8) you can set which network directory you want to listen on, 
so you can (for example) import the server /net to your local /net.alt and then 
start listening on /net.alt.

Btw this is also the easiest way to make a VPN-like bridge: import /net of the 
server, then start webfs for browsing, then all traffic this webfs process 
produces will be tunneled through the (tls-encrypted) 9p connection to the 
server.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] building a grid at university

2022-09-30 Thread sirjofri



30.09.2022 03:29:04 fig :
> would i configure the through drawterm, or through mounting the graphics, 
> /dev/screen etc. i ask because configuring a linux VPS is extremely simple as 
> the OS is entirely functional through just CLI.

For this system to work, your VPS also needs to be plan 9 based, because you 
need the /net filesystem. Theoretically you can replicate that filesystem on a 
Linux machine, but the software to do that doesn't exist natively (might be 
possible via inferno, but I won't recommend it, especially plan 9 works quite 
reliably on a VPS).

> is kvm necessary?

KVM is just what I know works most reliably. Most VPS providers we have good 
experience with use kvm and also qemu with kvm is battle-tested. Other 
technologies might work too.

> thank you for your correspondance. i’m obviously very nooby as far as the 
> networking goes, but i’m reading cat-v, FQA and 9p wiki every day.

Thing with plan 9 is, reading and learning the theory is great and necessary, 
especially for preparing everything. At some point you have to use it, ideally 
as much as possible.

> i’ve already written an rss feed aggregator in rc, which was fun and easy.

9fs net!sirjofri.de!333 /n/news
bind -a /n/news/ /lib/news
news

(This is what I provide using rssfill, if you want to try it. Source is online).

> i’m having a bit of trouble getting irc and usenet to ‘work’ on the school 
> network

I got usenet working inside acme using eternalseptember, but it felt quite 
dead. I had much better experience in fidonet 5 years ago (and I'd love to 
join, but I don't have software for 9 so I could only telnet).

> and i’m still a little bewildered by email on plan 9, but i’ll get there. 
> thanks again. 

No.

(To stay in humor.) Mail works, server is reliable. I also wrote a few blog 
posts about how I configured it. Good luck.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] building a grid at university

2022-09-28 Thread sirjofri



28.09.2022 23:58:23 fig :

>> Think about what you want to do with those files on your server. 
> i'm not going to needlessly elaborate, but i'll say that before this, i was 
> already using my ebooks, audiobooks, text files and music with the tools from 
> plan9port.

Great . I have no more linux left on any machine, so I never experienced this.

>> I recommend starting with a few servers (auth, fs, cpu, maybe even all in 
>> one machine) in the cloud, plus one local cpu server with a cache filesystem 
>> (cfs) for better latency. 
>> Have your servers in the cloud. You're not a data center. VPS can be 
>> actually quite cheap, I pay 2.42 euro per month per machine.
> i think i have to, yeah. is there anything important to consider when 
> choosing a VPS provider for plan 9 servers? or do they all play well?
> any recommendations are welcome.

Many use vultr, I use netcup. KVM technology mostly works well, hyper-v doesn't 
work at all, afaik.

> another possibility: i could put plan 9 servers on a couple thinkpads and/or 
> raspberry pis at my parents' house (not far from school) and have them 
> connect to the 9p.zone auth server or a VPS of mine. the reason i did not 
> initially list this as an option is because internet at home is pretty slow, 
> and also i did not want to do any port forwarding at home. but this 
> arrangement would not require any port forwarding, if i'm not mistaken.

Since you want to access your server, you still need some port forwarding.

What you can do is, have one single VPS somewhere and make your local server 
listen via the /net of that VPS. Basically you import the /net of the VPS to 
your machine and then start listening.

Slowness is not necessarily a big factor, depending on what you do. I've heard 
stories of Plan 9 being faster on ISDN than DSL because ISDN is targeted 
towards latency and DSL towards bandwidth, which makes sense, but I have no 
personal experience with this.

I was able to write my bachelor thesis via DSL with our famous German internet. 
My file+cpu server was behind a personal DSL provider and my local machine, 
too. I noticed the latency, but it was fine for my task. I imported the 
filesystem to my client machine, did my editing there without latency (except 
for saving), then built the pdf using rcpu for faster access. It could've been 
faster, but it was fine.

Regarding inferno: well yeah, go for it if you want. It's different and people 
like it or not. I personally rarely use it.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] building a grid at university

2022-09-28 Thread sirjofri

Hello and welcome,

28.09.2022 00:33:32 type9fr...@gmail.com:
> i want to have a server for my documents, ebooks, music, and images, as well 
> as a persistent IRC client and maybe even a mail server.

Think about what you want to do with those files on your server. Do you have an 
e-reader? A music player? A proper image viewer? Did you want to stream these 
to other devices? How do you want to do that as most devices don't support 9p?

> most importantly, i want to be able to access the grid remotely:

That's the more challenging part. I recommend starting with a few servers 
(auth, fs, cpu, maybe even all in one machine) in the cloud, plus one local cpu 
server with a cache filesystem (cfs) for better latency. I have a similar setup 
at home, but currently my local server has a full file server, not only a cache.

> from my laptop in class for example (same network) and maybe down the line 
> from anywhere, over internet.

You have to check if your internet allows accessing remote services like that. 
Some shared providers like universities block certain protocols, ports and IP 
addresses. Maybe first test with 9p.zone or sdf bootcamp.

> there are a number of things in the way of that, the first being my dorm room 
> does not have an ethernet outlet. i think mine is the only one on my floor 
> that doesn’t. second, my building loses power frequently, which is not ideal 
> for hosting servers; power aside, it would still lose internet connection. 
> the third problem is less adverse, but the network requires devices to be 
> authenticated to get online.

Have your servers in the cloud. You're not a data center. VPS can be actually 
quite cheap, I pay 2.42 euro per month per machine.

> does anyone see a favorable way to set up a plan 9 grid, either on campus or 
> an alternative? the biggest hurdle is definitely getting the grid on the 
> university network where it can be connected to locally, or getting it out of 
> the network and online.

The probably only way to get something like you really want is to talk to your 
university and maybe you can do a long term project with a small team of other 
interested students (plus a prof). Depending on the University you might have 
luck, but the result is less ... personal. But you could also add your own 
personal fileserver to that grid easier.

> and i’m aware of 9gridchan

9gridchan is mostly dead, and probably even more since a few months. Long live 
9gridchan, in 9p.zone. Both are actually targeted towards users, not our 
beginners.

Note that on 9p.zone there's an extra service with a public auth service 
everybody can use for free. You could hook up your own fileserver to use this 
auth and control who has access to it. For shared projects on a shared system 
you can use the existing eu grid at 9p.zone (eu.9p.zone).

Disclaimer: I'm part of 9p.zone.

sirjofri

P.S for testing out grid stuff you can also try installing a grid in a virtual 
machine network.

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Re: [9fans] Trouble compiling "Hello, world"

2022-08-01 Thread sirjofri




02.08.2022 05:38:39 Lucio De Re :

Perhaps it's a delusion, but I keep hoping to find a way to wean a
young community (black secondary education learners with much time on
their hands and very little beyond their smartphones to entertain
them) away from Tik-Tok, possibly also Whatsapp.

SDF bootcamp seems at least a seed for something at least some of
these teenagers may find instructive and a little mind expanding.


That's one of the reasons I built the open system eu.9p.zone. the idea 
was that we can build many (fileserver) systems around the world (hence 
the "eu" in the domain) with cpu servers people can join and learn how it 
is to be on a shared 9 system.



PS: We're too deep in the Global South to afford fancy equipment, even
used laptops are too expensive to ship to South Africa - never mind
the cost of laptop batteries. Maybe we can recycle the odd rPi, but
there the cost and transportation problem shifts to the display.

I am willing to listen to suggestions.


Eu.9p.zone currently runs on a VPS network and consists of 2 machines 
(one fs+cpu and one cpu-only). The auth server is one public auth server 
at 9p.zone (with some self-signup scripts I still need to improve).


The purpose of the auth server is that devs and community can provide 
many EXTRA services as they like and users in that authdom can just use 
them (provided they get access via permissions). In my case, after 
account creation at the 9p.zone auth users need to request access to the 
fs.eu.9p.zone (again, via script).


It's probably quite similar to the bootcamp, but it's more about general 
use and working on projects together than just learning, so it's also 
good for long term projects. However, I don't know if people work on 
projects there.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Re: ctrans - Chinese language input for Plan9

2022-07-21 Thread sirjofri




21.07.2022 04:44:53 cigar562hfsp952f...@icebubble.org:


sirjofri  writes:


I'm pretty sure that pure Chinese computers would look different.


I've often wondered that.  What input methods do Chinese speakers use?
What do Chinese keyboards look like?  How do they find/select the
character they want?  Are different sets of characters available on
different computers, or are input methods standardized?  I wonder.


I was more referring to computers built without any american influence at 
all, so no ansi, no ascii, no LTR, probably different keycodes...



I can't give you an answer as I'm not from an asian culture (although I 
studied it a little) and it's hard to answer anyway since I'm heavily 
influenced by american computers. I'd really need a few years studying 
those cultures heavily to be able to describe a possible tendency.


I can imagine though to look at early russian (and maybe even chinese, if 
there is) space technology. I know that the russian tech was very 
isolated compared to modern technology.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] ctrans - Chinese language input for Plan9

2022-07-20 Thread sirjofri




20.07.2022 05:54:34 Lucio De Re :


I have only one word for all the above: amazing!


Yes, truly amazing.


As a dumb occidental, I have no idea where one starts with ideograms,
but I realise how different the concept is and how its complexity can
stimulate technical creativity.


Or just make us realize how dumb "american" computers are.

I'm pretty sure that pure Chinese computers would look different.

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Re: [9fans] factotum (was: Connect plan9 with Linux SMB resource)

2022-04-10 Thread sirjofri


fatotum is quite easy, since it's a client as a filesystem.

The "real" server you can set up (but it's optional) is the secstore 
server which persistently holds your keys.


factotum just uses these keys (or the ones you entered manually or read 
in through a custom mechanism, e.g. a file) to handle all the 
authentication stuff you want to use.


So in the end, factotum is very easy. Just start it in your namespace and 
the programs will automatically use it. You can also run auth/fgui in a 
rio to have a nice entry box for new keys. Really, the complex thing is 
managing the namespace, which is the most important thing in Plan 9 
anyways, so you should definitely learn it.


Common start point for factotum is, run it in your lib/profile. I believe 
it's the standard lib/profile configuration to start the factotum in a 
terminal session and import the terminal factotum in a cpu session.


There's plenty of resources about factotum and auth in Plan 9 systems. Do 
yourself a favor and read the papers (/sys/doc/). Also I'm sure that 
almost all Plan 9 users can give you hints and tips about it since it's 
an integral part of the system.


On my very first Plan 9 laptop I btw just had my keys stored in a plain 
file, unencrypted.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Perhaps someone can give me an advice ...

2022-03-18 Thread sirjofri


Hey,

If someone does some work on native 9p stuff for android I'd really love 
some apk. I'm not an android dev, only did very few things on android 
programming-wise.


Thanks for starting this thread.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Perhaps someone can give me an advice ...

2022-03-17 Thread sirjofri


Hey,

I personally use cifsd (on 9front) and on android totalcommander+smb 
extension. It works perfectly fine without any issues across all my 
android devices. I share some of the files with other users via tcp80 
(behind tlssrv as https).


On windows I use drawterm for file transfer, but that's no comparison.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] plan9port spell and dict

2022-03-11 Thread sirjofri

I ported some tools of the UNIX V10 writer's workbench. Including spell 
checkers, suggest, diction, gram, ...


As a bonus, it includes some helpers for acme.

Source is at git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/wwb9, iirc, might also be available at 
shithub.


sirjofri

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[9fans] For sale: Atmel Evaluation Board (pollin.de)

2022-02-23 Thread sirjofri


Hello dear community,

before I put this on ebay I wanted to ask you if someone wants to buy 
this atmel evaluation board I bought many years ago at pollin.de.


I bought it in pieces and soldered it myself, never used it really, but 
it still looks good. It has German prints on the board.


I think I paid something like 60 euros back then. It is the board itself, 
plus theaddon board. I added the connection cable and a speaker output, 
as well as some cables plus connector for power (you need a trafo). I 
also made a cheap "box" for it (see photo).


I wasn't able to find the board on pollin, but it's listed on amazon if 
you look for the atmel evaluation noard v2.01.


I also bought some atmega32 which is on the board and will come with it.

If someone is interested, please pm me. We can discuss shipping details 
as well as price there. Shipping in EU (ideally within Germany) 
preferred, everything else can be very expensive (you might be cheaper 
just buying something similar locally).


I know this is not 100% 9 content, but I believe it could be used for 
some nice 9p sensor, eh?


Photo: http://sirjofri.de/oat/private/atmelevaluation.jpg

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Omero/UI filesystem (was: Plan 9 applying to GSoC)

2022-02-19 Thread sirjofri


Hello you two,

yes, others in the community also pointed me towards Omero and I skimmed 
through the man page about it. I don't know much about Plan B/Octopus, 
but it seems the general idea is very similar to what I have in mind.


However (you can correct me if I'm wrong), it seems that it is tailored 
to the Plan B UI, which looks very different to the standard devdraw/rio 
way of doing UI, so I guess there's quite some work to do.


For people who are interested: I played around with the concept some time 
ago, but I wasn't good at writing filesystems back then. The solution I 
came up with was rcgui, which is not a full filesystem but just a 
connection (as a pipe) with a textual interface. 
https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/rcgui


In general, I believe that with solid native filesystems and solid native 
programs many applications can just be shell scripting "glue" between the 
(descriptive) UI layer and the backend filesystem. For more complex 
applications devs might want to use the native programming language to 
write this "glue" or even make it part of the native backend application.


One component-based descriptive UI filesystem would open this gate for 
both approaches and UI designers can mockup their designs very easily.


Plan 9 is often about abstracting resources as filesystems, and I believe 
UI shouldn't be an exception. Devdraw abstracts drawing already, but I 
think the common way of making/managing/controlling UI can be abstracted, 
too.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 applying to GSoC

2022-02-19 Thread sirjofri


Good morning,

I skimmed through the ideas page as well as the mails in this thread and 
I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas.


(1) I am working on a port of 9front to the pinephone smartphone. 
Although it is still a long way to go I believe the project can be very 
interesting for UI ideas and implementations. This would also fit tbe rio 
alternatives idea. Let me quickly explain.


Plan 9 has a unique user interface built from many components. We have 
heavy use of three mouse buttons, many text-based interfaces (also 
counting acme tags, for example), system-wide plumber support, only to 
mention few of those. However, some of these aspects don't make much 
sense on a touch device due to big thumbs and the nature of touchscreens.


The idea for this would be designing an integrated, Plan 9-worthy 
touchscreen rio replacement for mobile devices. Ideally it can coexist 
with rio (i.e run inside rio windows and rio can run inside 
"this-window-manager" windows) and is fully compatible with existing 
graphical UI applications (using standard draw routines).


Although the software can currently not be tested on the pinephone (I'm 
still working on the kernel) there are some devices with rudimentary 
touchscreen support (I have a working thinkpad twist with 9front) we can 
use for testing, and some functionality can be tested inside scaled rio 
windows on common Plan 9 systems.



(2) Under similar circumstances (mobile device with touch input) another 
project might be some kinda graphical (rc) shell interface. I have an 
idea, and we also discussed ideas on the discord server.



(3) A high-level filesystem interface for UI widgets. Many modern UI 
layouts can be described as a hierarchy of containers. The UI filesystem 
would start as an empty window, which is reflected by an empty 
filesystem. The user could create widget containers (hbox, vbox) by 
creating directories and files, as well as input boxes, buttons and more 
by creating files. The hierarchy would directly reflect the drawn window. 
The user can listen to files for button interaction and write text to 
labels etc..



(4) A filesystem that filters a namespace, but the file contents and not 
the namespace.


The idea is to have a filesystem like exportfs, however, it doesn't just 
represent the files as is, but applies user-defined filters to the 
filenames/paths as well as the file contents.


Imagine you have a namespace which contains markdown files that end with 
.md. Using this overlay filesystem you can present the same namespace, 
but convert the filenames using sed (from .md to .html) and when reading, 
the file contents (from markdown syntax to html syntax).


The filesystem would be very powerful for exposing plain text data as 
html, encapsulating data into some predefined layout, and much more. It 
could essentially make any plain text filesystem available as regular 
web-friendly html files, convert troff source to postscript, convert plan 
9 images to png, and much more. You can even present device files as json 
for modern web applications.


Caching file contents can improve performance and reduce load.


(5) Ringfs. This is a very small project and also the least powerful as 
far as I can say now.


The general idea is that the filesystem presents the created files and 
when reading a file the contents point to the next file in the "ring" in 
alphabetical order.


It's probably best explained using the following shell interaction:

; touch fileA fileB fileC
; cat fileA
fileB
; cat fileB
fileC
; cat fileC
fileA

The project is very small and probably too simple for a GSoC project.



These are some ideas I thought about in the last months. Some are very 
small and I can imagine mentoring these smaller projects if it's not to 
hard. My time is rare (as for most of you I guess) and I never mentored 
any programmer, so I guess I'd ask more experienced people now and then.


Personally I like all of these ideas and would like to work on all of 
them if I had enough time.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] licence question

2022-02-04 Thread sirjofri




04.02.2022 17:29:55 ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:


On Friday, 4 February 2022, at 4:30 PM, Kent R. Spillner wrote:
In your experience do students appreciate being told what's best for 
them? ;)


My platform isn't one for teaching programing its for teaching other 
subjects like math, electronics, statics and so on. It's neither my 
goal nor the intention of such a project to teach the students how to 
realize such a project.


The suggestion that I would include the code so that someone could 
learn from it is unrealistic. If one of those students get interested 
in the way I did the whole thing they find the links for the projects I 
used as a basement.


Well, I personally would like to see how you made a kiosk app like that 
using a Plan 9 system. It's not that I want to see what you used as a 
base, but I want to see how you combined all that.


So there is a benefit of releasing some parts of the source somewhere at 
least, if not inside the software, maybe somewhere else.


Neither operating system development nor programming in C for plan9 are 
subjects of my platform and so there is no benefit for my students 
having the sources. If someone gets interested he/she can use the links 
for the used open source projects and become fans of whatever they 
like. Perhaps some will get motivated by using such a system to invest 
the necessary time and effort. I don't hide what I used so they can 
become enthusiasts if they want to. But this platform doesn't need 
accompanied sources nor will the students have direct access to a shell 
or the tools everything is hidden behind a simple kiosk app which has 
no other goal beside being the "envelop" for the real information meant 
to be taught.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Create HTML pages

2022-02-01 Thread sirjofri


I have multiple ways for different reasons:

My website is generated using static fragments and page fragments.

The blog however is a troff source that's converted to a static page 
fragment. This way I can output a nice pdf too.


I made shithub.us/sirjofri/epublish which uses a markdown-like format for 
text sources and outputs an ebook as pdf (via troff) and epub (custom 
converter). You can look at the sources, they use awk to convert the 
texts.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] licence question

2022-01-29 Thread sirjofri




29.01.2022 23:23:32 ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:
Lets take a tv set as an example for a kiosk application thats not far 
away. What benefit does the user of a tv have if I put the sourcecode 
of the tv set into the mounted flash device ? Sure everybody could 
benefit from reading the way I programed embedded circuit but aren't 
there better ways to share this information ?


Maybe I misunderstood something about licensing stuff but, can't you just 
distribute the working build product (binaries etc, without source) to 
the TV set (or kiosk) and keep the source in a completely separate open 
space, under some open source license? I mean, does open source (gpl, 
mit) mean, you have to distribute the source in the same device?


At least that would have issues with any linux distribution I know, where 
you usually just download prebuilt binaries and have to download the 
source separately.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] licence question

2022-01-29 Thread sirjofri




29.01.2022 15:08:11 ibrahim via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:
The system part regarding Freebsd and X11 can be reduced by using plan9 
dramatically. My own software has a few MB. In the plan9 distribution I 
will use a new image format based on horizontal scanlines using 256 
colors. This has an acceptable quality is faster to render and the size 
of the image files will shrink to about 25%.


I'm interested in that image format. Btw in my experience it's often very 
small to take an extremely simple image format that can compress well and 
store it in a compressed format, decompress on demand.


This is btw what farbfeld is meant for: very simple format with good 
enough color depth, easily compressible to sizes smaller than png. It's 
literally just uint16 rgba per pixel in horizontal lines. I haven't 
really looked at plan 9 image format and how it compares, but I assume 
the result would be very similar.


(Btw I should have uploaded some converters for farbfeld for 9 somewhere)

Also, while thinking about it, I think the plan 9 images support 
different color palettes and stuff like that?


In general, I agree with a kiosk solution that doesn't need public 
sources, however I encourage you to split your content and the software. 
Content can easily be on a common fileserver and mounted into /lib or 
wherever, while you can certainly benefit from other people being able to 
read your code and contribute improvements and fixes. They don't need all 
the content for that and sample files can be enough.


Maybe try to compare your system with how /sys/doc is set up: it contains 
the important papers. Imagine on a linux system you'd have all papers 
about all systems! It would be huge and nobody would read it.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] suggestion : new service targets for plan9

2022-01-28 Thread sirjofri


Hey, that was my idea! 

Well, to be precise, I also had the idea of having a filesystem hierarchy 
for window contents.


/mnt/window/mywindow/vbox/hbox/button/label/
and inside that: text, padding, margin, ... Whatever you like.

It would be easy to write UIs using shell scripts, and to be fair, many 
user applications can just be a shell script that hauls data between UI 
and specialized filesystems for their task.


I suggest you look at the rcgui test I did quite some time ago, I believe 
it's available at https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/rcgui. It's sadly not a 
filesystem, but does an app lifecycle approach and you can react to 
events like redraw and give simple text draw commands for button 
controls. I really would like to see the filesystem approach as that's 
what my goal is, but I was not so good at implementing filesystems 
(although I have many ideas) and I have very limited time due to 
ninephone project and especially work.


Btw I was planning to have some kinda filesystem wrapper so you can 
easily write simple filesystems using rc, some kinda glorified 9pcon, but 
that's another topic.


if you're interested in discussing touch UI ideas (or stuff that leads 
towards touch UI on 9) I set up a garden repository on shithub for this 
exact purpose. garden means, you only need a shithub account and have 
push access. The URL is http://shithub.us/garden/touchui/HEAD/info.html . 
I wanted to add my ideas earlier, but I sadly didn't have enough time for 
that (I have ideas though, just need to write them down).


sirjofri

28.01.2022 10:55:01 Frank D. Engel, Jr. :

I was actually thinking of a somewhat different approach to providing a 
more modernized user interface.


Consider that rio currently exports the required files for each window, 
which provide the same interface as the display driver underneath them.


Now consider adding a new "control manager" file server which exports a 
filesystem to manage individual controls arranged inside a window (or 
at the root level if not running rio or other window manager).  Create 
a directory inside the exported filesystem to add a new control.  
Inside the directory would automatically appear those same files that 
are exported by rio or by vga, but specific to the control.  There 
would also be a file for controlling the scaling and placement of child 
controls of the control in some defined manner, allowing "layout 
managers" to be defined (such a file would also appear at the root).  
Add a new subdirectory within the directory of a control to create a 
child control.


Individual types of controls can then be implemented as separate 
programs or libraries which would interact with those basic elements to 
provide the specific functionality of a control or layout manager - 
standard controls to be provided would be the typical buttons, 
checkboxes, text fields, etc., while layout managers would arrange 
their children in specific patterns, such as vertically stacked, 
horizontally stacked, grids, etc.


This mechanism is an extensible way to cover the provision of "modern" 
controls within a window, even when still using rio, and is true to the 
"everything is a filesystem" nature of plan9.



A second step would be to create an alternative to rio which would do 
the same job, but with title bars and the like.



Some kind of file management / desktop environment application could 
then be built on top of these foundations.  Users could mix and match 
the use of applications based on the control manager within the 
existing rio environment, and the existing command line / rio 
applications such as acme would work unmodified with the new window 
manager but have "modern" title bars and some sort of "minimize" and 
possibly "full screen" functionality, maybe with a dock of some kind.



As far as I can tell this would require practically zero core changes 
to the system as it is built entirely on existing primitives already 
offered.



On 1/27/22 9:03 PM, ibrahim via 9fans wrote:
I developed a kiosk version of plan9 (based on 9front and legacy9) and 
am about to develop a single user desktop system. Those can coexist 
with the existing plan9 system.


I named the new service targets kiosk and desktop. Both work without 
rio.


Currently I used initdraw, initmouse, initkeyboard, loadimage, 
flushimage from devdraw to avoid breaking of compatibility with the 
existing plan9 systems while the whole rendering of the windows is 
framebuffer based. Instead of the usual plan9 fonts I used regular 
truetypefonts.


So my suggestions would be :

1) Define new service targets kiosk and desktop (Currently I do this in 
init or /user/.../lib/profile. This makes it possible for a user to 
start an alternative window manager or even a single applicaton (kiosk 
service) with a modern look and feel.


2) Define a layer between vga and devdraw perhaps vgafb which improves 
the performance f

Re: [9fans] acme and sam - mouse suggestions?

2022-01-27 Thread sirjofri


Hello all,

I just quickly want to share my experience, although I haven't used any 
real three buttons mouse in the last ten years.


For my laptop system I really love the (older) IBM/lenovo trackpoint. It 
has three physical buttons below the keyboard and I can reach them easily 
with my thumbs. I'm sure many of you know this experience.


It's a different story on newer lenovo laptops (the ones with the modern 
keyboard) where the point feels sluggish and tends to drift, which is 
extremely annoying. Also it's deeper and it doesn't feel like you control 
the joystick.


For my desktop environment I prefer the cheapest usable wired vertical 
mouse with scrollwheel (20 Euros)[1]. It's almost one of the first search 
results on amazon and it looks like many brands just use the exact same 
model from the same (chinese?) manufacturer, although there are slight 
differences in quality and feel.


I can click on the scrollwheel to create a MB2 event, which is fine for 
me. I have to say I have used blender for years and am using Unreal 
Engine as a job, so I'm used to using the scrollwheel.


The cheap vertical mice usually have two additional buttons at the thumb 
side in the upper part of the devices. They are mapped to 
forward/backward, but they're irrelevant for any 9 experience. I also 
have another wireless vertical mouse where these buttons are in the 
bottom part.


In my experience it's better to have them in the upper part since you 
grab the mouse for dragging them around while repositioning. However, 
it's just weird holding the mouse in the air while pressing one of the 
buttons in the lower part. It's like pushing a button downwards while 
keeping the device up, against gravity. However, that's just my personal 
opinion. I barely use the device as I'm mostly in an office-like 
situation and for mobile the trackpoint has more benefits.


sirjofri

[1] if you try to get one of these make sure to not get the very 
cheapest. When I was looking the first I bought was 15 euros and it broke 
after half a year or so, the next one I got for 20 euros was fine and 
it's still in use after years. The material is not the best and feels 
cheap but I guess that's what you get for this price.


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Re: [9fans] Who is in the Plan 9 foundation? Where can I follow them?

2022-01-20 Thread sirjofri




20.01.2022 15:01:15 sho.danilo via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net>:

Hi, I'm new to Plan 9. I learnt about it when I found out the P9F was 
founded, here https://plan9foundation.org/activities.html there is 
"Preparing for a new release, including 
patches[http://9legacy.org/patch.html]; since like first half of last 
year, but then nothing, and I see nothing about who is in the 
foundation. So, where can I find informations about them? I see 
"changes" points to 9legacy, but I also read in this mailing list that 
the GSoC work was done on 9front, so on which release is the foundation 
working on? 9legacy or 9front?


First, welcome :)

I'm in this community for a few years and I can tell you, I don't know. 
It's what I was asking a year ago and more info than what's on their site 
is not really public.


They state they "promote" all Plan 9 related stuff (explicitly not 
mentioning 9front), and they prepare a release (where, what). Otherwise 
they only link to 9legacy and legacy 9 stuff.


9front has nothing to do with plan9foundation at all, they're completely 
independent. If you want to find out more about it, devs are quite open 
and you can say hello in #cat-v at irc.oftc.net or the 9front mailing 
list.


I don't know about GSoC projects.

sirjofri

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[9fans] Sorry, I'm late (Christmas, New Year)

2022-01-03 Thread sirjofri

Hello dear community,

some time ago I started writing some kinda christmas mail to the
community.  Not some "special christmas edition", more like an annual
reminder, invitation for looking back, and (of course) as a wish to
all members to have good days with their families and friends.

However, this year is different.  My mail server didn't have enough
storage to even receive mails and I didn't have much time to fix it -
until now.  I now switched from a WORM+cache to a fsmain CWFS setup,
so it's fine for another few years of saving files.  I'll certainly
miss my dump sometimes, but that's just how it is, maybe I'll try some
venti some day.

Anyways, back to topic:


Usually, I'd start the mail with christmas greetings to all who
celebrate, as well as to all who don't celebrate.  I'd wish you all a
nice end of the year, and hope for a good start of the next year 2022.
However, I'm late, so I can just hope that you all celebrated well and
had a good start into the new year.

I'd like to look back at the last year, maybe mention (and smile) at
certain events we encountered.  I also invite all of you to share more
stories and your personal highlights.  On-topic or off-topic, I think
it doesn't matter and you know very well when you spam the list with
irrelevant stuff.


THE YEAR 2021

Last year started with a hassle.  There was a small internet storm
about a certain jpg file and people began to hate 9front for something
that it never was.  As bad as it seemed, it feels like today nothing
of that is left and everything is back to normal.[1]

However, it left its traces: mycroftiv officially "ended" the live
part of the 9gridchan project.  Many of its services are read-only
today and the gridchat is offline.  Some services are still live and
people continue to use them, some users are asking for ANTS patches
every now and then.

Good bye 9gridchan, Hello 9p.zone!

Because of these events, we wanted to continue something of the spirit
of 9gridchan.  Therefore some individuals and 9gridchan users started
9p.zone, which wants to be some public registry with services like
chat and maybe more.  I tried adding some (experimental) public auth
server with an additional 9front network for people to join.  9p.zone
continues to live on and people are joining the chat and hanging out
together.

These were roughly the events of January, but from my perspective
that's almost everything that happened.

Well, almost.  Let's not forget the official announcement of the Plan
9 foundation.  Many people didn't know what exactly will happen, and
to be honest, I'm still not sure about that, but they're here and
organized the GSoC, which is a good thing, isn't it?  Also they got
the rights for the original Plan 9 sources and built a small museum
about it.  Welcome Plan 9 foundation.

For me, large parts of the following months were shaped by not having
much time for community and Plan 9 in general.  "My memory of 2021 is
fading" and I can only roughly summarize SOME events.  Feel free to
add more larger milestones I'm missing.

In July, 9front released a new version "Community vs Infrastructure".
Normally I wouldn't mention 9front releases, but this one changed the
whole source control to git.  Ori's git was good enough to be
integrated and after a few sysupdates, all future sysupdates don't
need python/hg anymore!  I believe this is a huge step forward and it
makes many things easier.

Throughout the year we welcomed many new users and community members.
Although I was missing many opportunities to actually meet all of you
I noticed many new nick names and it's great to see the community
grow.

And that's basically everything I can remember right now.  I
personally ended the year reading through the A64 manual as well as
figuring out how the Pinephone works and the 9front source code is
organized, fighting blindly with u-boot; as well as fixing my mail
server in the last few days[2].  I hope to be able to hang out more
with many of you and dedicate more time to helping new users and
writing documentation.

I also hope we can organize some European/German Plan 9 meetup this
year when the pandemic is (hopefully) over.  Stay healthy and may God
bless you!

As mentioned before I encourage you to share your personal highlights,
especially Plan 9 related ones.


sirjofri

---
1. If you don't know what I'm talking about: Don't care too much. I
   don't think it's worth it.
2. Yes, I'm trying to port 9front to the Pinephone.

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Re: [9fans] New to plan9

2021-10-15 Thread sirjofri




15.10.2021 15:05:25 Sigrid Solveig Haflínudóttir :


A few useful links to get started:


To add more infos for community stuff and more:

(Of course, read as much as possible, the man pages, wiki, fqa, articles, 
papers,  My notes here are just for you to get a small overview of 
the community.)


In general, you'll notice that the bubble is quite small. You'll see the 
same people hanging around and actually meet with people rather than 
writing as an anonymous person to other anonymous persons. I was active 
for less than a month and people started recognizing me.


Here are places people hang out and discuss stuff:

Mailing lists. There are few of them. The 9fans mailing list (here), I 
won't say anything about it (you are already here).


There's also the 9front mailing list for 9front-specific topics (9front 
is a fork); as well as the inferno mailing list.


For chatting there are multiple channels:

The 9fans discord server [1] if you prefer modern apps. We have a voice 
chat and some channels, as well as a bot. Some of the channels are 
bridged to a matrix channel and (through that) to the ##9fans irc on 
oftc.


The ##9fans oftc (actually multiple channels) channels.

The #cat-v channel on oftc is often used for 9front discussion (and cat-v 
discussion).


9p.zone (which is also the web page) has its own chat system known as 
gridchat (short: grid). It's a 9p filesystem you can import into your 
system and read-write the files there. There are some very special people 
there who don't usually hang out in the other community channels.


In general you'll meet many people in multiple channels depending on 
their preference. You can ask your questions everywhere and hopefully 
they'll be answered.


Welcome to the community!

sirjofri

---
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Re: [9fans] GSoC 2021 project ideas

2021-09-20 Thread sirjofri


Re ext2:

Afaik sigrids ext stuff also supports ext4, and only ext4 (and a non-ext 
format) is mentioned on the supported filesystems list on the pinephone 
wiki.


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Re: [9fans] GSoC 2021 project ideas

2021-09-20 Thread sirjofri

9front on pinephone is actually a project I'm interested in. I checked 
out some details:


The pinephone boot loader can boot from ext4 partition, so it seems 
possible. We'd have to use some ext4 filesystem (eg the one made by 
sigrid) and add it to the boot filesystem.


With a bit of luck (and proper arm compatibility) we can then get a 
9front pinephone booting, maybe even with some screen. I expect many 
things to not work (networking, touchscreen, WAN and lots of other phone 
hardware stuff), but if we get the base system running and some 
networking we already have something usable.


The most complex task is designing a proper plan 9-worthy touchscreen 
interface and developing apps for that.


sirjofri

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[9fans] Epublish, publish books as pdf and epub

2021-09-10 Thread sirjofri


Hello all,

In the last days I built a collection of scripts to generate 
epub-compatible files as well as troff-ms files from the same text 
source, all on Plan 9.


The text source files are very similar to markdown syntax, but you can 
define blocks of text that only work with one of the two output formats. 
For using the scripts you only need awk and mk, as well as zip for epub 
and troff -ms for ... troff (plus other tools to convert it to pdf etc).


Here is the package: http://shithub.us/sirjofri/epublish/HEAD/info.html

There's a sample "book" inside that package, I plan to extend this 
example to describe all formatting features, e.g. writing bold and 
italic.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

2021-09-01 Thread sirjofri




01.09.2021 02:29:42 kokam...@hera.eonet.ne.jp:

By the way, I made your drawterm-android on my ubuntu-20.04.2 machine.
My android is version 11, and made by Sony (SO-41B).
I now have drawterm.apk file on my home directory, like 
src/drawterm-android/drawterm.apk

(size=777151).

How I can install this to my android?
I'm a novise user of android...


You have to copy the apk file to your android system and install there. 
If you haven't already stuff like f-droid installed you'll have to enable 
unknown sources in android. This guide can help: 
https://www.lifewire.com/install-apk-on-android-4177185



(Note, there are different solutions for different versions, and you can 
install apps using the adb, the usb android debugger, but I don't assume 
you want to use it.)


If you need other guides look for "install apk android (version)" or 
similar.


Btw there's a small known bug: when opening a connection the first time 
the app crashes silently. Opening it a second time it works without 
issues.


And there's the mouse offset bug. In my version it's almost the same 
offset across the whole screen (y-axis), in the original the offset is 
different.


Good luck

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)


Good morning,

GPUs are SIMD processors. The hundreds of cores are great for highly 
parallel calculation.


In GLSL/HLSL I can write a program which is calculated for a very small 
set of pixels (usually 2x2 or 1x1). So if you have  a resolution of 10x10 
the program is basically run 5x5=25 or 10x10=100 times in parallel. Boost 
the resolution to more real values like 1080p you see how the many cores 
benefit the whole calculation.


This high parallelization can only really happen because most stuff is 
independent. For example, when raytracing each ray is (almost) 
independent of other rays.


Still, the 2x2 matrix is often calculated dependently because for 
texturing (and mip mapping) you need the "distance" between two pixels in 
a fragment shader. This is why (for texturing) you may end up having 
slower programs and some waiting time between some threads, because 
sometimes you need the value of the neighbor thread and have to wait 
until it's calculated.


Well, these are very language-specific details that are important for 
graphics, but apply similarly to other use cases. I can imagine that for 
neural networks you can just write the code for one node nad execute it 
500 times for 500 nodes in parallel. Imagine having this beast on the CPU 
with just 4 cores...


I hope this helps you understand how GPU cores ("shaders") work.

Vulkan would indeed be interesting. Since we are only interested in the 
compute part it might even make our programs really small, the "hello 
world" part of drawing triangles would be the "client" side (writing a 
rasterizer, raymarcher, tracer, whatever). It could still be a lot lines 
of code, but maybe we still benefit from the 10% speedup.


I still have to understand how all this "shader compilation" stuff works. 
In webgl it's like, "here's my code, make a shader from it, then I tell 
you it's a fragment shader". Shader compilation happens automatically. In 
UE shader compilation takes a long time, and I believe also in blender 
shaders are stored in a precompiled binaries.


sirjofri

23.08.2021 06:13:53 Bakul Shah :

Don't high end GPUs have thousands of "cores"? Even high end CPUs don't 
have more than a few dozen cores to 128 or so. While each kind's cores 
are very different, seems to me GPU/CPU paths have diverged for good. 
Or we need some massive shift in programming languages + compilers. I 
lack imagination how. Still, the thought of the CPUs gaining the 
complexity of the graphics engine scares me!


-- Bakul

On Aug 22, 2021, at 12:09 PM, Paul Lalonde  
wrote:


I'm pretty sure we're still re-inventing, though it's the CPU's turn to 
gain some of the complexity of the graphics engine.


Paul

On Sun, Aug 22, 2021, 12:05 PM Bakul Shah  wrote:
Thanks. Looks like Sutherland's "Wheel of 
Reincarnation[https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~cscheid/reading/myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf]; 
has not only stopped but exploded :-) Or stopped being applicable.


-- Bakul

On Aug 22, 2021, at 9:23 AM, Paul Lalonde  
wrote:


It got complicated because there's no stable interface or ISA.  The 
hardware evolved from fixed-function to programmable in a commercial 
environment where the only meaningful measure was raw performance per 
dollar at many price points.  Every year the hardware spins and 
becomes more performant, usually faster than Moore's law.  With 3D 
APIs hiding the hardware details there is no pressure to make the 
hardware interface uniform, pretty, or neat.  And with the need for 
performance there are dozens of fixed function units that effectively 
need their own sub-drivers while coordinating at high performance with 
the other units. 
The system diagrams for GPUs look complex, but they are radical 
simplifications of what's really on the inside.


Intel really pioneered the open driver stacks, but performance 
generally wasn't there.  That might be changing now, but I don't know 
if their recently announced discrete product line will be 
driver-compatible.


Paul


On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 8:48 AM Bakul Shah  
wrote:
The FreeBSD amdgpu.ko is over 3Mbytes of compiled code. Not counting 
the "firmware" that gets loaded on the GPU board. drm/amd/amdgpu has 
200K+ lines of source code. drm/amd over 2M lines of code. Intel's 
i915 seems to be about 1/10th the amd size. AIUI, this is linux GPU 
driver code, more or less unchanged (FreeBSD has shim code to use 
it). How did the interface to an SIMD processor get so complicated?


…



-- Bakul




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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)




22.08.2021 20:25:12 o...@eigenstate.org:


Quoth sirjofri :


22.08.2021 18:41:06 o...@eigenstate.org:
Basically do software rendering on the GPU?


Yes. Or software neural net evaluation on the GPU.
Or software video decoding on the GPU. Or software
image transforms on the GPU. Or software signal
processing on the GPU.

If there's an interface to be selected, it needs
to be tractable to implement, *and* general purpose
enough for everything that wants to use it.

Well, it's totally possible. Even Nanite (the new system in Unreal 
Engine

5) has its own rasterizer and I believe even its own base pass. Also
Lumen does software rendering for global illumination.

But for serious 3d AAA stuff we'd have to consider: Lumen is for 
next-gen

GPUs and Nanite for newer GPUs. We'll never reach their quality in
realtime if we don't use the GPU features (built-in rasterizer, ...) 
to

have enough free power for crazy software calculation.


By the time any code is written, next-gen GPUs will be
previous-gen GPUs.

General compute is what any hardware you buy a few years
from now will be doing -- and it's far more intersting
in terms of what capabilities it allows.


I like that /dev/compute approach, but may I suggest putting it below
another directory /dev/gpu/compute so we have the ability to add
/dev/gpu/{vertex,geometry,fragment,tessellation,pixel} later?


I think supporting those is a cost we should not pay. It's
fundamentally solving a less general problem, and adds a
lot of complexity for the potential of a small performance
boost.

We already have zero people sinking time into the slim
interface; sinking time into a fatter interface seems
like a bad idea.


Gotcha.

Maybe I'll find some time to implement some kind of gpufs or /dev/gpu (if 
it's general purpose I'd suggest renaming compute to gpu since "compute" 
could be anything. The computer does compute, wow.).


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)




22.08.2021 18:41:06 o...@eigenstate.org:


Quoth Paul Lalonde :
Opinions on how to bring this to Plan9?  I don't really have any - 
it's a
huge pile of work with minimal benefit.  If you're looking for 
lightweight
graphics, WebGL is a doable path, and almost certainly the right way 
to

experiment with Plan9-like interfaces to graphics hardware.


It seems like the interesting part of GPUs
is the general purpose computation. Writing
an interface for pure computation seems like
the way to go.

Hardware rendering is a restricted case of
software rendering; it seems like it would
be better to write code that could do software
rendering, and run it on the general purpose
compute engine of the GPU. The same goes for
basically everything else you may want to do
with a GPU.


Basically do software rendering on the GPU?

Well, it's totally possible. Even Nanite (the new system in Unreal Engine 
5) has its own rasterizer and I believe even its own base pass. Also 
Lumen does software rendering for global illumination.


But for serious 3d AAA stuff we'd have to consider: Lumen is for next-gen 
GPUs and Nanite for newer GPUs. We'll never reach their quality in 
realtime if we don't use the GPU features (built-in rasterizer, ...) to 
have enough free power for crazy software calculation.


On the other hand, getting _any_ GPU computation running on Plan 9 would 
be great, even if it's just compatible pure-CPU implementation (aka gpufs 
without a GPU).



Spitballing a while ago on the grid, I came
up with something that looked a bit like a
batch job interface, with a heirarchy that
looks something like this:

    /dev/compute
    new
    $func/new
    $func/$job/data
    $func/$job/result


I like that /dev/compute approach, but may I suggest putting it below 
another directory /dev/gpu/compute so we have the ability to add 
/dev/gpu/{vertex,geometry,fragment,tessellation,pixel} later?


I haven't looked at your sample script in more detail, but on the first 
glance it seems solid.



Prototyping something like this as a 9p server
on unix would be interesting. So would providing
this kind of cpu interface in software.


This is also a great idea, instead of tweaking drawterm. I don't have a 
linux machine with a GPU (I'm full 9front and only windows for work), but 
I guess if this prototype uses OpenGL (or alt) it could also work with 
software GPU emulation.


I'd really like to try something like that, but writing filesystems is 
(still, sadly) new to me and I also don't have much time, being a 
full-time game developer.


If someone else wants to try it please make development open source so we 
can provide patches, and I'm also happy to at least test things.



Hooking this up to devdraw would probably be
interesting for doing "hardware" rendering, though
latency may be an issue if it's not implemetned as
a local '#' device.


I'm not sure about the latency (I would just try it once it's done), but 
can't we use the hwdraw stub function for interfacing with this? I also 
doubt we'll draw many complex shaders for /dev/draw.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

The benefit of a drawterm GPU implementation is that you can basically 
use the whole driver pipeline of the underlying host OS. Eg for the 
windows version you can just write the software that uses the GPU driver. 
All programming effort will just be writing a graphics implementation and 
a proper 9p interface. Basically just a driver bridge between 9p and 
OpenGL for example.


sirjofri

22.08.2021 15:44:45 Paul Lalonde :

I'd love to see  GPU support for Plan9.  This discussion falls right 
into my professional capacity.  I'll say that people generally 
*grossly* underestimate the complexity of a modern GPU and of its 
supporting software stack.  The GPU driver is effectively a second 
operating system with shared memory and DMA interfaces to the host.  
Even bringing up a modern GPU for just compute tasks is a very large 
endeavour.


That being said, if you want real hardware support, the best place to 
start is currently AMD's open-source stack.  Ignoring the Vulkan bit, 
understanding their platform abstraction layer (PAL) and shader ISA 
(https://developer.amd.com/wp-content/resources/Vega_Shader_ISA_28July2017.pdf) 
is the base.  The lower hardware levels are reasonably 
well-described in linux's libdrm and its AMD support in amdgpu.


Opinions on how to bring this to Plan9?  I don't really have any - it's 
a huge pile of work with minimal benefit.  If you're looking for 
lightweight graphics, WebGL is a doable path, and almost certainly the 
right way to experiment with Plan9-like interfaces to graphics 
hardware.


Paul



On Sun, Aug 22, 2021 at 5:30 AM sirjofri 
 wrote:


22.08.2021 14:10:20 Stuart Morrow :

Also:

people have discussed that for years


They have?  I mean I might have seen occasionally someone vaguely
going "some sort of GPU support would be cool to have".  That isn't
discussion.


I've even heard of someone actually making GPU stuff work on plan 9.
I've
only heard from their partner, who made a cute glenda thing on a piece
of
cloth. I chatted with her a little and told her she should encourage
her
partner for some discussion about this in our channels. It looked like
it's some academic work, but I don't know any details about it.

Worst case, someone already has a proper and good GPU implementation
for
Plan 9 and nobody knows about it.

sirjofri

Btw if the said person reads this: it would be nice to learn some
details.


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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)




22.08.2021 14:10:20 Stuart Morrow :

Also:

people have discussed that for years


They have?  I mean I might have seen occasionally someone vaguely
going "some sort of GPU support would be cool to have".  That isn't
discussion.


I've even heard of someone actually making GPU stuff work on plan 9. I've 
only heard from their partner, who made a cute glenda thing on a piece of 
cloth. I chatted with her a little and told her she should encourage her 
partner for some discussion about this in our channels. It looked like 
it's some academic work, but I don't know any details about it.


Worst case, someone already has a proper and good GPU implementation for 
Plan 9 and nobody knows about it.


sirjofri

Btw if the said person reads this: it would be nice to learn some 
details.


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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)

I should mention I thought about the layout of a GPUfs some time ago. I 
just lack lots of knowledge about this, the gist was to write shader 
(code or compiled?) into some files, also write image data and mesh data 
to other files, abd reading results from other files. But as I said, I 
lack lots of knowledge about how GPUs work and never wrote any OpenGL 
code myself, only shader code. It always seemed like it's hundreds of 
hundreds of lines of code to draw a triangle (which is the basic hello 
world program).


sirjofri

22.08.2021 12:04:41 Frank D. Engel, Jr. :

While not necessarily unwelcome as a possibility, I don't think 
GPU-based drawing/gaming is as relevant to this discussion (or as 
important of a goal for Plan 9 / 9front) as is GPU compute (GPGPU).


The ability to leverage GPU resources across CPU servers for 
computation purposes would be of great benefit to the platform, and 
working out a driver interface by starting the process remotely via 
drawterm seems like a sensible step in that direction.


On 8/22/21 3:07 AM, sirjofri wrote:


22.08.2021 05:16:42 Eli Cohen :

deep learning is another interest of mine too. hardware support is a
big deal for that... some kind of support for GPUs would be nice.
people have discussed that for years... hardware drivers are 
difficult

and important to do correctly!

I always really liked the "XCPU" and drawterm type ideas of using
other OSes for their existing strengths along with Plan 9. maybe
drawterm could have a GPU device driver or something... that being
said I have sometimes found it ends up surprisingly easier doing it
all on Plan 9...

That's also something I thought about a few times already: drawterm
with GPU support. The only issue I see is, for realtime applications
like games the draw times would be network bound and thus pretty slow.
It would work for heavy GPU applications where almost no draw calls
will exist (no textures, very low poly meshes, ...), but for heavier
stuff we'd need to address that.
That's the benefit of a native driver: you could calculate the server
side (heavy CPU calculations) on a cpu server, the client/frontend
side (including draw calls) on a terminal and the pure graphics on the
GPU.
I'd still give the drawterm GPU a shot. Maybe I can set drawterm up
for compilation on my work PC (two GTX 1080Ti) and try figuring out
how to do all that stuff. However, I've never done graphics
applications on windows or somewhere else that uses OpenGL or DirectX
(I'd try OpenGL because portability), only written shaders so far.
I'll surely need some time (which is always rare as a game developer).
Btw I don't know the exact specifications for GPU usage for neural
networks. I assume it's all compute shaders? Maybe it's even a kinda
blackbox, put stuff in (draw call), read things out. I assume this can
work perfectly fine for draw times, depending on the data.
sirjofri


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Re: [9fans] Drawterm GPU (was: Software philosophy)




22.08.2021 05:16:42 Eli Cohen :

deep learning is another interest of mine too. hardware support is a
big deal for that... some kind of support for GPUs would be nice.
people have discussed that for years... hardware drivers are difficult
and important to do correctly!

I always really liked the "XCPU" and drawterm type ideas of using
other OSes for their existing strengths along with Plan 9. maybe
drawterm could have a GPU device driver or something... that being
said I have sometimes found it ends up surprisingly easier doing it
all on Plan 9...


That's also something I thought about a few times already: drawterm with 
GPU support. The only issue I see is, for realtime applications like 
games the draw times would be network bound and thus pretty slow. It 
would work for heavy GPU applications where almost no draw calls will 
exist (no textures, very low poly meshes, ...), but for heavier stuff 
we'd need to address that.


That's the benefit of a native driver: you could calculate the server 
side (heavy CPU calculations) on a cpu server, the client/frontend side 
(including draw calls) on a terminal and the pure graphics on the GPU.


I'd still give the drawterm GPU a shot. Maybe I can set drawterm up for 
compilation on my work PC (two GTX 1080Ti) and try figuring out how to do 
all that stuff. However, I've never done graphics applications on windows 
or somewhere else that uses OpenGL or DirectX (I'd try OpenGL because 
portability), only written shaders so far. I'll surely need some time 
(which is always rare as a game developer).


Btw I don't know the exact specifications for GPU usage for neural 
networks. I assume it's all compute shaders? Maybe it's even a kinda 
blackbox, put stuff in (draw call), read things out. I assume this can 
work perfectly fine for draw times, depending on the data.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Software philosophy




19.08.2021 12:56:02 k...@a-b.xyz:


Quoth Lucio De Re :

What seems to be harped upon by the vocal defenders of 9front,
however, is this fictional idea that there is another community, let's
call them "9legacy", that is attempting to subvert 9front's efforts to
gain some kind of recognition in the bigger picture.


The core 9front contributors and most everyone else who commented
on this situation in 9front's super secret inner circles simply find
it socially awkward that 9front isn't mentioned. Some may read more
of the signal.

Otherwise 9front folks couldn't care less about being recognized by a
website.  Nothing would change or improve if that happened.  The only
ones who objectively suffer in the current situation is newcomers who
aren't properly informed by a website on the options they have if they
want to run a "Plan 9".


Basically this. P9f just doesn't mention 9front, and that should change 
imo, to better reflect the whole Plan 9 ecosystem. The same way p9p 
should be mentioned (or is it?)



I personally don't see an issue with 9front and 9legacy continuing to
be their own things.  Different people have different ideas for what
they want to make out of their Plan 9 and sometimes their ideas are
simply incompatible.

I'd like to see people communicate and exchange ideas and/or code more
effectively but this will always remain in the hands of individuals
who decide how to socialise and what to work on.


100% my opinion. Don't make a canonical 1P9, just let people explore 
their ideas. Like, even 9gridchan had it's own "fork", if you want to 
call it like that.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Software philosophy




19.08.2021 11:51:48 hiro <23h...@gmail.com>:


Thank you for raising them. As I said up front, I am not a P9F member
of any kind. But I know that its intentions are far less nefarious
than of those who wittingly ascribe nefarious intentions to them.


Can you prove that? what makes you competent to know without being a 
p9f member?



Again, 9front has an "inside", get it to address with P9F their and
your reservations. If they don't respond, then you and other 9fronters
can bring evidence of ill intentions to this forum.


Sadly that's not how it works. Until they specifically admit it, they
have every right to claim they just had no time to act on behalf of
unimportant pet projects.

Of course over a longer time, such a claim becomes less and less 
believable...


If their website source was available online I would happily send them a 
patch.


... and that says me, who always needs to figure put how to create and 
apply patches.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Software philosophy




19.08.2021 11:29:29 hiro <23h...@gmail.com>:


anymore. Other dubious sources can be found on the 9front /who/ site
about p9f, where they apparently stole resources from 9front/cat-v 
pages.

Very suspicious somehow.


that's because they lost the bell-labs server. else they could have
"stolen" it from their own machines.
we mirrored all the documents in fear that the data on that web server
would get lost some day, and it seems we were right.


I want to excuse myself here for the word "stole". I should have written 
it differently or at least put it in quotes.


The mentioned resources were original Plan 9 resources afaik (or even 
obviously). I'm glad cat-v/9front was able to keep them stored for future 
generations. It's just not a good light having documents on a website 
with the title of cat-v/9front origin while not mentioning that part of 
the community at all.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Software philosophy


Hello dear community,

I've read through many things in this thread and just want to add some 
two cents in a list format:


1) p9f (to my knowledge) never said anything about The One Plan 9. This 
was afaik the idea of some other community member, and I never heard any 
statement by p9f about that.


2) In fact, p9f is pretty silent, not only these days. This could be a 
good sign, as they let community be what they are, only occasionally 
taking part in it.


3) the p9f website promotes links to the Plan 9 archive software (V1-V4), 
9legacy as "Plan 9 with many useful patches", the RPi version and other 
Plan 9 resources. 9front is _never_ mentioned at all. It seems like they 
don't consider 9front as a Plan 9 system at all.


I don't know why, it's possible they just don't want it to exist or they 
don't know how to see it. It just hurts me personally as a community 
person who uses 9front and not the original Plan 9. And it's confusing. 
Am I even a Plan 9 user? The core OS principles are the same and most 
"shell" concepts also.


4) The split between original Plan9/9legacy and the 9front fork is 
reflected in a split between communities. David and the 9front core devs 
already showed that they are generally willing to share and accept 
patches and I never noticed any bad tone in their discussion, however the 
community is split up. And I don't think that we are so big that we _had_ 
to split up, there are other reasons, maybe historical reasons I don't 
know as a "fresh" community member with only ~5 years.


5) I really wished p9f would tell us more about their plans. It really 
seems like it's what we (9gridchan chat) feared in the beginning: a 
secret society. p9f is very silent, currently only seems to manage GSoC 
and nothing more. They told us they needed time to organize GSoC and 
themselves, but that was in january/february!


It's fine if they want to be silent, but it would be nice to see what we 
can expect from them. Currently it seems like they just want to share 
links to 9legacy and the archive and organize GSoC and hide the fact that 
9front exists.


6) p9f had a page about their purpose. It was like, they want to promote 
all Plan 9 systems and related technologies: 9atom, 9legacy, ... missing 
the (apparently) most obvious one: 9front. I couldn't find the page 
anymore. Other dubious sources can be found on the 9front /who/ site 
about p9f, where they apparently stole resources from 9front/cat-v pages. 
Very suspicious somehow.


7) To clarify: I don't want to see p9f as bad. I want to see them as a 
nice organization which is open for community efforts that need some 
official site. I want to see other community members/devs there, maybe 
one 9front contributor. I want to see them mentioning 9front like they 
mention other Plan 9 projects. I want to see p9f members open their 
mouths sometimes (which does happen) and take part in the community.


These are my wishes and notes, everything from my perspective.

sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] Codebase navigation and using tags files in acme

2021-08-18 Thread sirjofri


Hello Ben,

17.08.2021 22:22:09 Ben Hancock :
I've just recently started using the acme editor and am really enjoying 
it, and trying to get the hang of the "acme way" of doing things. One 
bit of functionality that I'm familiar with from other editors is the 
ability to easily look up a function or symbol definition within a 
codebase. In Emacs and vi, this is done by generating tags files (etags 
or ctags), which those editors can parse and allow you to easily jump 
to a definition of the symbol under the point/cursor.


The original developers of Plan 9 software were people who made simple 
things even simpler so they can understand them. Imagine your codebase is 
so small that you can know many symbols and have other symbols open or at 
least know where to look. Using g(rep) in the parent directory of your 
project and your brain should be enough. If it isn't your project might 
be too complex/large.


(That's different when reading other code or revisiting code after a long 
time, but then you are supposed to read it again so you can understand it 
anyway.)


What's the preferred method or workflow for achieving this in acme? I 
have tried passing a selected symbol to 'g -n' in the window's tag, 
using the Mouse-2 + Mouse-1 chord. That gets me part of the way there 
but isn't effective if the file where the symbol is defined happens to 
be in another directory. I feel like I'm missing something.


I doubt you are missing something. People used to use text editor since 
there were no IDEs, and keep in mind that the core of unix was written 
with ed, maybe even on teletypes. It's like writing code on paper, and it 
works.


My advise is, read and produce good clean code. If you need syntax 
highlighting and fancy IDE stuff your codebase is probably too large. 
With more training you can work with larger codebases, but still they to 
keep it simple and small. If you really need to work with extremely 
complex codebases you likely won't find success using plan9 at all.


Many plan9 tools are one C file only. In acme you can jump between 
selected text by right clicking it, which works very well in these cases. 
Right clicking included files opens them and you can search there. These 
are basically the tools you have.


I'm personally very happy reading man pages and searching the plan 9 
source with g(rep) and plumbing the results.


I hope this helps.

Oh, and you can always write your own tools and call them using 
middle-click in acme. You could write an rc-script that cd..s to your 
project home directory (if it's a git repo, the one containing .git) and 
invokes g, for example.


sirjofri

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AW: [9fans] p9f mention of 9front

2021-06-24 Thread sirjofri


Hello all,

Klong mail incoming. I hope my English is ok and I don't tread on other's 
toes.)


from my perspective it looks like this:

There are multiple Plan 9 forks kor distributions). They all are 
philosophically and technically different, but they still share patches 
(even if many people don't know). This is fine.


It would be great to have some kind of compatibility. i'm not necessarily 
talking about binary/ABI compatibility, but network compatibility, shell 
scripting and usability. People are actively working on it. I personally 
have no reason to run 9legacy in my network since 9front has everything I 
need, but other people do.


The community is split into multiple different areas. Some areas are open 
to communicate with others, some actively work together and some are very 
"unique": you don't really hear from them in most channels, besides some 
email here and there, but that's it.


I can name #cat-v, #plan9, ##9fans (bridged to discord) and the 9fans and 
9front mailing lists.


P9f is some very special case: They have the rights to the original 
codebase, they stare noble goals, but they seem to actively hide the fact 
that 9front exists. Hardcore 9front people don't really care about that, 
but the community (and I) do. I consider it really sad that 9front seems 
so cut away from the Plan 9 history just because some people try to hide 
it. Many people asked about mentioning 9front on the p9f page.


When p9f started they told us that they focus on more important stuff 
first (which I can totally understand). Some activities (also mentioned 
at 9front.org/who/p9f) make me think that they just don't want 9front to 
exist.


They state they want to push all stuff in the plan 9 family (9p, plan9 
with forks, inferno), but they seem to actively promote 9legacy (which is 
fine, it's the most original continuation of plan9) and hide 9front 
(which is just sad). This is especially sad since 9front is probably the 
most modern and most active Plan 9 system currently existing.


I just hope we all find a way to still respect each other and to grow as 
a community. Misunderstandings happen as well as lots of other human 
factors.


My long 2 cents

sirjofri

Disclaimer: I actively used the original Plan 9 4e, Plan 9 on rpi, 
inferno, and I am an active 9front user.


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Re: [9fans] Writer's Workbench (was: troff refer and bib)

09.04.2021 23:45:47 Xiao-Yong Jin :
On Apr 9, 2021, at 12:57 PM, sirjofri
wrote:

Writer's Workbench

https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/wwb9

(Works on 9, but I need to make it better for different platforms and
some tools need adjustments. Send patches.)

What exactly is the license? Even just reading code of unclear license
could get many people in trouble.

TL;DR: "non-commercial
copying, distribution, performance, display or creation of derivative
works" is allowed.

Sadly the license is not open-source! That's why I added the note and
didn't change much, especially not the license notes. I also didn't add
license information on purpose, so people like you will have to ask and
search for more info.

See this document for more info about why I felt free to port it:
https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Norman_v9/statement_regarding_Unix_3-7-17.pdf

"will not assert its copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial
copying, distribution, performance, display or creation of derivative
works"

If I understand that correctly I should be fine and the distribution of
the port is legal under the mentioned terms, but of course I cannot
simply change the license. It is _not_ my code nor my software, I just
made it work on 9 and added some rc files. My additions can be considered
as open source, but I'm not sure if I can just state that in the repo.

I should add some notes about the original source and the statement, I
think.

I hope this helps. I don't think I can help more than that, and Ianal. If
you need help with the software you can ask, of course.

When testing, I should mention it works on 9front. I didn't test it on
any other fork, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

sirjofri

Btw I'd love to release it under an open source license, if I can. These
tools are old, but still helpful and can be used in comparison with
modern tools, maybe even in combination and for developing better tools
in the future.

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Re: [9fans] troff refer and bib




09.04.2021 21:51:50 Charles Forsyth :

I personally found the code hard to read,


The original looked like this:


Yeah, I've seen the original wwb Unix V10 code. Looks very similar...

But still I'm surprised I got it to compile without many adjustments. 
Most changes were pure syntax changes.


If someone's interested, you can compare my source with the v10 code at 
tuhs. I didn't touch anything I didn't need to.


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] troff refer and bib




09.04.2021 18:25:32 David du Colombier <0in...@gmail.com>:

may be offtopic but now I'm just curious :-) what's wwb ?


Writer's Workbench.


Writer's Workbench

https://git.sr.ht/~sirjofri/wwb9

(Works on 9, but I need to make it better for different platforms and 
some tools need adjustments. Send patches.)


sirjofri

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Re: [9fans] troff refer and bib