On 2/13/18, Rui Carmo <rui.ca...@gmail.com> wrote: > I get the current website and some of the in-jokes, but a step-by-step guide > for installing, building and contributing would be great ...
It's so easy to fall into the trap of elitism, while bemoaning the shortage of development hands needed to bring Plan 9 (or any one of its other flavours) into the "mainstream". What keeps Plan 9 alive and this list/group thriving is the conversation, irrespective of the actual pertinence to the "real world". It is knowing that the world has rejected the Plan 9 "grace" and are therefore not deserving, blah, blah. Human natures, humoured, harmlessly. Why not? Plan 9 is elegant, 9front presumably has some robust features, the other flavours can handle their own niche objectives. I've been absent here for a long spell and came back recently to discover most of the old hands still at it and some new blood raising, mutatis mutandis, the same issues we've seen go past since 1995 (for me). It is as familiar as it is reassuring. But the reality is that Plan 9 is too good in too many ways and the world can only absorb chunks of that at the time (disruptive technologies, I believe they were labelled, way back) and so it progresses very little while the few remaining contenders to the prize of OS of the century or millennium or whatever have the resources to track the bad engineering decisions they (the OSes) facilitate or even demand. Merging Plan 9 flavours would resolve many otherwise intractable problems, but it will do nothing to improve the penetration of Plan 9 in the marketplace and no one has the funds to tackle it, even if they felt that the result would be worth it. But there is something in not following the fashion; I, for one, really cherish it. Mostly because it is all so simple, once you leave the baroque world of Windows, Linux and OSX behind. Lucio.
