[9fans] Summer of Code 2024

[Anthony Sorace]

We're applying again! This is Google's 20th Summer of Code.

In brief:
• Applications close Tuesday
• We need mentors
• We *especially* need project ideas from people who can mentor them

The application window closes on Tuesday, and I'll be finishing up our formal 
application in the next day or so. As is the case every year, the most critical 
part of an application is the org's ideas page[1]. We've got some great ideas 
already from folks who've been involved in GSoC in the past, but more are 
always welcome. If you've got an idea you'd like to work with a student on for 
the summer, please let us know! You can either put them on the wiki directly 
(please preserver the format!) or mail me (on list or off). While ideas 
themselves are interesting, please note that, in this context, they're a lot 
more useful if you are prepared to mentor them (or have talked to someone who 
is).

If you're interested in mentoring, please let me know! Bringing your own 
project idea is great, but we can also use more experienced, eager folks to 
pair up with new contributors on other projects. Each project gets a primary 
and backup mentor.

We've got an overview page[2], and all the program details are on Google's GSoC 
page[3], and you might be interested in the program timeline[4] in particular.

One notable change to the program: there are now *three* project sizes: small 
(expected to take about 90 hours), medium (about 175), and large (about 350, 
the "traditional" GSoC projects). For GSoC overall, this is mostly about making 
the program more accessible to more people; for us, in particular, I think it 
has some real potential to open up our project types, as in past years we've 
had to dismiss some otherwise strong ideas that weren't enough to justify a 
summer's work. You can read more about that in Google's announcement of the 
2024 program[5].

Your friendly neighborhood org admin,
Anthony

[1] https://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2024-ideas/index.html
[2] http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc/index.html
[3] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
[4] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline
[5] 
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2023/11/google-summer-of-code-2024-celebrating-20th-year.html


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[9fans] Plan 9 Foundation is a 501(c)(3)

[Anthony Sorace]

Since announcing the Plan 9 Foundation, folks have asked how they can support our work. We’ve had that “on hold” until we had a bunch of organizational things sorted. We’re very pleased to say that the last big one of those is now completed: the Plan 9 Foundation has been recognized as a 501(c)(3) organization by the IRS.If you’re a U.S. taxpayer, donations to the Foundation are now tax deductible. This also lets us participate in a lot of other things, perhaps most notably employer matching programs. If you work at a company with such a program, you can now multiply your donation. The easiest way to make a donation is via credit/debit card here:https://www.zeffy.com/donation-form/25fe42cb-e841-497d-94b0-c05a3a5bb153Zeffy is a credit card processor that only works with non-profits and passes through your entire donation amount (they’ll ask you for an optional “tip” to fund their operations).If you’d like to make a donation in another way, more information can be found on the Foundation’s page for donations:http://plan9foundation.org/donate.htmlOn behalf of the board, thanks to everyone who’s expressed interest for your patience in getting to this point.Anthony Sorace,Treasurer

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Re: [9fans] Error when trying to install contrib/install

[Anthony Sorace]

On Feb 22, 2023, at 00:02, quiekaizam via 9fans <9fans@9fans.net> wrote:
> 
> Indeed, my test(1) doesn't seem to support such syntax. Is this a version 
> problem?

I believe so, yes. It looks like 9front has made some significant changes to 
(or removed? I didn’t dig in) test’s handling of “implied” -a and -o operands. 

For comparison, see:
https://9p.io/sources/plan9/sys/src/cmd/test.c
http://git.9front.org/plan9front/plan9front/e6c6217b35c319127f0200fdb28ec86e1b774a4f/sys/src/cmd/test.c/f.html

I would suggest compiling the plan9 version locally and seeing if that fixes 
the issue.
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Re: [9fans] Power mac support

[Anthony Sorace]

Many years ago, David Eckhardt’s group at CMU had it running, although when I 
played with it the hardware support was minimal. They took an interesting 
approach to using the openfirmware for driver mediation, IIRC. I don’t believe 
it was ever publicly released, although they were being pretty liberal with 
“guest” access.

I wonder if anything has changed about it’s releasability. Prof. Eckhardt would 
likely be able to say more/better.

> On Jul 28, 2022, at 19:29, Thaddeus Woskowiak  wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> I am curious if there is a port of plan 9 to the Apple Power Mac
> series of computers, more specifically the 64 bit G5 machines but also
> the 32 bit G3/G4. I saved a G3 imac, two G4 towers, and two G5's from
> the scrap heap when a friend moved. I'd like for them to be useful.
> 
> Cheers
> -taw

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[9fans] Plan 9 not selected for GSoC

[Anthony Sorace]

Folks:
Unfortunately, we were not selected for GSoC this year. They've got 203 
other orgs participating and you might check out the list:

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2022/organizations

There's lots of things in there that are interesting on their own, of course, 
but maybe FreeBSD needs a 9p client or you want to get ffmpeg building on Plan 
9 again. :-)

Anthony


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[9fans] Plan 9 applying to GSoC

[Anthony Sorace]

Plan 9 is applying to GSoC again!

The application period closes on Monday, and our formal application is in. As 
is the case every year, the most critical part of an application is the org's 
ideas page[1]. We'd love additional fleshed-out contributions for that. Since 
we had a little confusion on this last year, please note that we're looking 
specifically for well-developed ideas that would be good summer-sized projects 
for new contributors, from folks willing to mentor those projects (rather than 
"it'd be neat if someone would do X"); see the existing ideas page for examples 
(some of which are more developed than others, certainly!).

If you're interested in mentoring, please let me know! Bringing your own 
project idea is great, but we can also use more experienced, eager folks to 
pair up with new contributors on other projects.

We've got an overview page[2], and all the program details are on Google's GSoC 
page[3], and  you might be interested in the program timeline[4] in particular.

One other note, for those of you who're familiar with the program, there are a 
few notable changes, which Google goes into in a post[5] about them. In brief, 
though:

- The program is now open to a lot more than just formal students
- There are two project sizes: large ("traditional") and medium (like 
last year's)
- The timing of the work is more flexible.

I think these are all great (even if they make a little more work for admins 
and mentors!) and should be nice additions to the program.

Your friendly neighborhood org admin,
Anthony

[1] https://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2022-ideas/index.html
[2] http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc/index.html
[3] https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com
[4] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline
[5] 
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/11/expanding-google-summer-of-code-in-2022.html
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Re: [9fans] Connecting to the wiki from linux with plan9port

[Anthony Sorace]

In addition to Fazlul’s note, I continue to find this useful, even though it’s 
read-only:

https://9fans.topicbox.com/groups/9fans/T033f756b8ec05b5d-M92ccac8a85a9504f3ae8cab7/command-line-read-only-wiki-client

I think a write mode modeled after what ipso does shouldn’t be too hard, but 
I’ve not needed it myself (I use this to check something quick/isolated, and 
the Acme client for edits or if I’m doing more involved reading).

> On Nov 12, 2021, at 11:22, Cam  wrote:
> 
> 
> I'm assuming it's possible to mount the wiki using plan9port however I 
> haven't been able to find documentation on it. If it is indeed possible I'd 
> like to update the wiki with instructions on how. Does anyone have any 
> insight into how to make this happen?
> 
> 
> -Cameron 
> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink

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Re: [9fans] astro: meeteeor shouwer?

[Anthony Sorace]

On Jul 28, 2021, at 17:20, Rob Pike  wrote:
> 
> If you mean, why is it spelled like that?

Yes, exactly. Thinking about this on the drive home, I remembered “values of 
beeta“ and remembered these are listed in betatab, and figured it was something 
like that. Thank you for the response.

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[9fans] astro: meeteeor shouwer?

[Anthony Sorace]

Speaking of astro, anyone know the story behind this?

:; astro | sed 2q
2021  7 28
Pisces australid  meeteeor shouwer
 :; agrep meeteeor /sys/src/cmd/astro/*.c
/sys/src/cmd/astro/search.c:61: 
event("%s  meeteeor shouwer",

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Re: [9fans] Four numbers in /lib/sky/here

[Anthony Sorace]

There are a few other things which also use that file (e.g. latcmp, the 2e 
road(1), gmap (who did that?) my darksky program). I’m wondering if I’m missing 
something that uses that fourth number. I certainly can’t rule out user error. 

> On Jul 27, 2021, at 10:20, David du Colombier <0in...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The fourth number looks like a mistake.
> astro(1) only parses the first three numbers.
> 
> --
> David du Colombier

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[9fans] Four numbers in /lib/sky/here

[Anthony Sorace]

I went to update my /lib/sky/here after a server move and realized it has four 
numbers in it. I know I added it at some point, but I can’t remember what that 
fourth number is doing in there. The pre-move version:

:; cat /lib/sky/here
41.499 81.558 250 290

Anyone have any idea what might use that?



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[9fans] #plan9 on libera.chat

[Anthony Sorace]

Similarly: with Freenode having gone in a bad direction in the last month or 
so, #plan9, #plan9-gsoc, and #inferno have moved to libera.chat (the network 
started by most of the former Freenode staff before things went south).

There’s a few dozen of us hanging out right now; stop by and say hi. I’ve 
updated our wiki, which also has some links to plan9 irc clients (I’m a fan of 
andrey’s irc7, personally).



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[9fans] Google Summer of Code projects announced

[Anthony Sorace]

The students for Summer of Code 2021 have been announced. Plan 9 was awarded 
three slots and after evaluating the various proposals we will be working with 
the following great students over the summer:

• Ethan Long will be working on nIME, an input method for Japanese text
• Cameron Connell will be working on modernizing the underlying data struct of 
edwood
• Dimitrios Iatrakis will be working on adding support for OAuth2 to factotum

We are very excited to be working with Ethan, Cameron, and Dimitrios, and 
grateful to them and all the students who submitted proposals. We had a great 
variety of submissions, and I wish we'd had a few more slots to work with. We'd 
love to continue to work with the students behind all the proposals, even if we 
can't in GSoC. For the accepted students, your mentors will be in touch shortly.

If you're interested in following along, most of the pickup activity will be 
happening in plan9-g...@googlegroups.com and everyone's welcome to follow 
along. (https://groups.google.com/g/plan9-gsoc) We're now in the "community 
bonding period", and while the mentors are primarily responsible for that, it's 
always nice to have the whole community involved.

Welcome to the (almost) summer!

Your friendly neighborhood org admin,
Anthony


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[9fans] GSoC: less than 24 hours for student proposals!

[Anthony Sorace]

Students! We want to work with you!

If you’ve been holding back or on the fence, get your proposals in now! Don’t 
wait until the last minute; no extensions for computer problems if you can’t 
get it submitted. Your proposal needs to be submitted to 
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ by 11:00am US-Pacific tomorrow, April 13th 
(and it needs to be in the “final” state, not a draft, in that system). And 
we’re more than happy to help you make your proposal as strong as possible, 
either on the plan9-gsoc list or on #plan9-gsoc on Freenode. 

See http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc/index.html for more information on our GSoC 
participation, and https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/how-it-works/#timeline 
for the full program timeline.
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Re: [9fans] searching advice

[Anthony Sorace]

I can’t help too much with ext, but:

> mount -c /srv/ext2 /n/hostfs /dev/sdD0

That part’s almost certainly wrong. /dev/sdD0 will be a directory; ext2srv will 
expect you to give the file containing the actual file system. This is probably 
/dev/sdD0/.



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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 in Summer of Code

[Anthony Sorace]

Hi there. Our wiki got confused. We're still looking into what caused it to get 
confused in the first place, but I've given it a prod and things seem to be 
working properly again now. Thank you for the report.

And you are definitely not late! The student application period only opened on 
Monday, and goes for another 13 days or so. Let us know if you have any 
questions.

> On Mar 31, 2021, at 7:45 , jayantanand2...@gmail.com wrote:
> 
> Hey, my name is Jayant Anand, I am currently an undergrad at IIT Dhanbad, I 
> have a good knowledge of Operating system and I am willing to contribute to 
> Plan 9.
> 
> It might be late but  I was trying to access the idealist for the GSoC 
> (http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html) and I am unable to do so.
> 
> I am getting this error.
> 
> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink

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Re: [9fans] Transfer of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

On Mar 23, 2021, at 16:55 , Dave MacFarlane  wrote:
> 
> Wow, fantastic news! Congratulations!

Thanks! I'm pretty excited

> Is there any way we can donate to the foundation (time or money) to keep 
> things moving along?

Not at this time. We've still got a bit more to do with various bits of 
paperwork, registrations, and the like before we can do that. We'll let 
everyone know, don't worry. :-)


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Re: [9fans] Transfer of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

Oh, what David said. :-)

> On Mar 23, 2021, at 13:15 , Anthony Sorace  wrote:
> 
> No. This was correct this morning. I'm looking into it; thanks for pointing 
> it out.
> 
>> On Mar 23, 2021, at 12:13 , Kurt H Maier  wrote:
>> 
>> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 06:06:49AM -0700, a...@9srv.net wrote:
>>> 
>>> The historical releases are available right now at:
>>>   https://p9f.org/dl/
>> 
>> The 4e and 4e-latest tarballs are identical.  Is this intentional?
>> 
>> Thanks either way,
>> khm

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Re: [9fans] Transfer of Plan 9 to the Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

No. This was correct this morning. I'm looking into it; thanks for pointing it 
out.

> On Mar 23, 2021, at 12:13 , Kurt H Maier  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 23, 2021 at 06:06:49AM -0700, a...@9srv.net wrote:
>> 
>> The historical releases are available right now at:
>>https://p9f.org/dl/
> 
> The 4e and 4e-latest tarballs are identical.  Is this intentional?
> 
> Thanks either way,
> khm

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[9fans] Command line read-only wiki client

[Anthony Sorace]

I've been using the wiki a lot more recently. Inspired by the wiki in 
tilde.club, I made a read-only command line client. It's simple: 'wiki -l' 
lists the pages, 'wiki foo' prints article foo, 'wiki foo bar' looks for an 
article called "foo_bar", then "foo-bar", then separate "foo" and "bar" 
articles.

I've got both a Plan 9 and p9p version:
http://a.9srv.net/src/wiki
http://a.9srv.net/src/wiki-p9p
Adjust the first line in the latter for your installation.

If you've got a wiki mounted on /mnt/wiki (Plan 9) or `{namespace}/wiki (p9p), 
it'll use that, so if you talk to multiple wikis that'll work. Otherwise, it 
relies on "9fs wiki" finding a wiki installation. I use this in 9fs on Plan 9:
case wiki
srv -m 'net!p9f.org!wiki' wiki /mnt/wiki 
and this on p9p:
case wiki
srv 'net!p9f.org!wiki' wiki



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[9fans] Plan 9 in Summer of Code

[Anthony Sorace]

Google has just posted the list of accepted organizations for Summer of Code 
2021, and I'm happy to report that Plan 9 has been accepted! 

The first wave of eager student applicants is already checking out the ideas 
pages for the orgs on the list, and that'll keep up for the next few weeks. If 
you're a student, we'd love to talk to you! The ideas behind Plan 9 cover a 
wide range of skills and topics, and we can find a good fit for most folks. And 
if you know students looking to spend part of their summer on interesting code, 
please send them our way!

The next big milestone is March 29, when the student application period starts. 
Between now and then, potential students will be checking out the various 
participating orgs and their ideas pages, getting in touch with the community 
and prospective mentors, and talking about what they'd like to work on over the 
summer. We've got a GSoC-specific mailing list and IRC channel, but we usually 
see a bunch of discussion in the main channel, too, so if folks come by asking 
questions, please try to be welcoming and helpful.

As a reminder, we have a page dedicated to our participation in GSoC 
(http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc/index.html) as well as our ideas page 
(http://p9f.org/wiki/gsoc-2021-ideas/index.html).  We've got a bunch up there, 
but it's certainly not too late to add more, and for any students reading, we 
absolutely encourage submissions not on our list (just talk to us first so we 
can help you produce the strongest application).

Again, we are serving as an umbrella organization, so if your interests are in 
Inferno, plan9port, or something else related, we would still love to hear from 
you.

You can also check out the full list of participating orgs 
(https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/) to see what good company 
we are in… or on the off chance that you're a student considering participating 
with someone else. No hard feelings. ;-)

Your friendly neighborhood org admin,
Anthony



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Re: [9fans] 2c/2l make sense, but why 1c/1l?

[Anthony Sorace]

The compiler suite has had a few compilers in it which were used for things 
other than kernel ports. I can’t say about the 68000 specifically, but that 
would be my guess. The i960 and DSP3210 compilers are other examples. 

> On Feb 23, 2021, at 21:18, Steve Simon  wrote:
> 
> I don't believe a 68000 compiler was ever released by the labs but there
> may have been one - some blit terminals had 68000s (and maybe gnots?) so
> its plausable.
> 
> There was a port of the plan9 compilers to the VAX but I think its
> sourcecode was lost (jmk found an executable some years).
> 
> -Steve

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

It did not seem to be anything so nefarious. The IRS was not publicly stating 
their reasons and I don’t want to speculate about them too much, but it seemed 
to just be a pause while they figured out how to differentiate legitimate 
organizations from scam ones.

> On Feb 10, 2021, at 10:35, Wes Kussmaul  wrote:
> 
> 
>> On 2/10/21 12:17 PM, Kurt H Maier wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 11:40:18PM -0800, Anthony Sorace wrote:
>>> More information can be found on our web site, http://p9f.org/.
>>> 
>> "That effort stalled, mainly due to the treatment of software-focused
>> non-profit organizations under U.S. regulations at the time."
>> 
>> What does this mean?
>> 
>> 
> Let me guess.
> 
> In their ongoing effort to starve open source projects of resources, 
> proprietary software vendors lobbied Congress to add special requirements for 
> software projects filing IRS Form 1023?
> 

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

We’re starting off with the prior years’ GSoC money. We haven’t yet pursued 
other funding avenues since there’s still a bunch of legal/tax things we have 
to finish first. 

> On Feb 10, 2021, at 10:24, hiro <23h...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> you got other money sources lined up apart from gsoc?
> 
> i don't know if this might open up some new avenues for those of us
> who have programming dayjobs but would rather quit those and make
> something more meaningful that isn't profit-driven and part of the
> usual IT industry.
> 
> or what's the idea behind this foundation, the opportunity this might create?

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

The focus at that time (2009) was on getting a 501(c)3 org to accept the GSoC 
money after we were accepted that year. I talked to some folks doing similar 
things in other orgs and was advised that the IRS had stalled granting that to 
new software-focused non-profits. Since that main driver evaporated, we didn’t 
push in with the formation. The IRS has figured it out since 2009. :-)

> On Feb 10, 2021, at 09:19, Kurt H Maier  wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 11:40:18PM -0800, Anthony Sorace wrote:
>> 
>> More information can be found on our web site, http://p9f.org/.
>> 
> 
> "That effort stalled, mainly due to the treatment of software-focused
> non-profit organizations under U.S. regulations at the time."
> 
> What does this mean?
> 
> khm

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Re: [9fans] Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

> Thierry asked:
> 
> One suggestion: add a link for donations. I, for one, when I can't
> provide code to software I'm interested in (even remotely), try at 
> least to give some money.
> Don asked:
> 
> How do we get involved in or become a member of the foundation?

Glad to hear there's interest!

We'll absolutely have ways for people to get involved (including financial 
support, for those inclined) soon, but there's still a bunch of stuff we have 
to get in order first.

Anthony


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[9fans] Plan 9 Foundation

[Anthony Sorace]

We are pleased to announce the creation of the Plan 9 Foundation.

The Foundation exists to promote and further the development of Plan 9 and 
related technologies for lightweight distributed systems.

More information can be found on our web site, http://p9f.org/. We've also 
brought up a new wiki, reachable on the web at http://p9f.org/wiki/welcome/ or 
over 9p at tcp!p9f.org!wiki.

As our first major activity, the Plan 9 Foundation will be coordinating Plan 
9's application to (and, should we be accepted, participation in) Google's 
Summer of Code. That includes hosting the all-important Ideas Page for this 
year, as well as other supporting documentation; more on that in a separate 
email.

We'll also be coordinating the return of the International Workshop on Plan 9. 
Last year's efforts to bring IWP9 back were a big part of what led to the 
creation of the Foundation. It's still not clear when we'll be able to have an 
in-person conference responsibly, but we're eager to get there.

We want to make Plan 9 and all that surrounds it stronger, more accessible, and 
more useful for all. We know there's plenty going on already and we want to be 
clear that we're excited about that. We hope to add to that, provide some 
additional resources, and improve things for everyone using Plan 9 technology 
in their projects.

We're still getting started and have quite a bit to do before everything is 
running smoothly, but we're really excited for what the year's going to bring. 
2021 is going to be great for Glenda.

Thank you for your time,

Geoff Collier
David du Colombier
Charles Forsyth
Paul Lalonde
Ron Minnich
Jeff Sickel
Anthony Sorace
Skip Tavakkolian


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[9fans] Plan 9 Applying to GSoC 2021

[Anthony Sorace]

Hello! After a few years away, we’ll be applying to Google’s Summer of Code 
program again this year.

Summer of Code is a program Google runs where they fund students to work with 
mentors from open source organizations. The primary purpose of the program is 
to help students work with real-world open source projects, with the hopes of 
creating long-term contributors to open source software. You can read more 
about the program on Google’s [GSoC] site.

We have participated in GSoC several years in the past, and get a bit better at 
it every year. We've had a lot of positive experiences for both students and 
mentors over the years. Applications (for both organizations and students) are 
competitive and there is no guarantee we'll get in, but I'm hopeful. We'll 
again be acting as an "umbrella organization" for Plan 9 and related 
technologies, so whether you'd like to work with Plan 9, Inferno, plan9ports, 
or anything else related, we're open to the project.

Applications for organizations just opened, and we’re working on this year’s 
application now. There are three things we’re asking the community for:

1. Project ideas. One of the key parts of the application is the project ideas 
page. If you’ve got ideas that seem like they’d be a good fit for the program, 
and *especially* if you’re up for mentoring them, please think about how to 
describe them in sufficient detail for a student to work on (objectives, 
promising starting points, likely challenges, ).
2. Students. If you are a qualifying student, please consider applying! If you 
know students, and especially if you’re in an academic setting yourself, please 
encourage students to apply. If we get in, the number of students we’ll get to 
work with is determined in part by how many apply to work with us, so if you 
can get prospective students excited about spending part of their summer on 
Plan 9, that’s really helpful. Also, GSoC is a very good program for students 
generally and a wide variety of open source projects participate, so most folks 
with a technical bent can find something of interest. 
3. Mentors. If you’ve been working with Plan 9 or related technologies for a 
while, would be excited to help new folks get into it, and have time for 
mentoring a student over the summer, please get in touch.

We’ll have more to say about these, especially where we’re collecting and 
sharing the project ideas and prospective mentors, in the next few days. For 
now, start thinking about projects and talking to students.

For those of you familiar with the program from previous years, there have been 
a few changes. Most notably, starting this year the expectation is no longer 
that students be working mostly full-time on their GSoC project during the 
summer. This broadens the pool of applicants significantly, but also changes 
the size of projects. The expectation this year is that students work on a 
175-hour project over the course of 10 weeks. Google has also broadened the 
types of students who can apply. You can find more information about the 
changes on Google’s blog post about the [changes].

I'm excited to be applying to this again. If nothing else, it's just fun to get 
to talk to a bunch of new folks about this all. Look for more info in the next 
few days.

Your friendly neighborhood org admin,
Anthony


[GSoC]: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

[changes]:  
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/10/google-summer-of-code-2021-is-bringing.html

[stats]:
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/08/google-summer-of-code-2020-statistics.html

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Re: [9fans] Raspberry Pi 4 stability dependent in RAM

[Anthony Sorace]

> Richard asked:
> The pi4 is very sensitive to power supply voltage. Are you using
> an "official" pi4 power supply (5.2v)?

Yes; same power supply on the 4GB and 1GB models. That is, same exact
unit, on the same outlet. I had all sorts of problems with my first several Pi
and know better than to mess around with that now.

> The pi4 flashes the red power LED to indicate undervoltage, so you can look
> out for that if you don't have a monitor to see the lightning bolt on.

Is this lightning bolt a hardware feature? Like, it overlays it on the display,
even on Plan 9? I've never seen it. I'll watch for the power LED indicator.

I've also got the bad behavior on two different 1GB models, so it's at least
pretty unlikely to be a hardware issue.

Then this went other places. Is anyone else running a 4GB Pi 4 with Richard's
latest kernel, successfully? Terminal or cpu?



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Re: [9fans] iOS drawterm

[Anthony Sorace]

I mean, c’mon, now it practically *needs* drawterm...

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-OctqFhNnB/?igshid=rmqsml1hwqck

> On Mar 25, 2020, at 10:53, Skip Tavakkolian  
> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> rummaging around /mnt/term when using drawterm might be enlightening.
> 
>> On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 4:20 AM Kim Lassila  wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Mar 25, 2020, at 8:19 AM, Anthony Sorace  wrote:
>>> 
>>> With iOS getting first-class mouse pointer support, I’m looking at the iOS 
>>> drawterm port again. Has anyone touched this since the old GSoC project bit 
>>> rotted out?
>> 
>> Drawterm is quite slow at reading and writing pixels on the screen. I 
>> learned this when I started recording screen in Plan 9 
>> (https://github.com/9d0/screencast). 
>> 
>> Instead of porting drawterm to different platforms I would like to see vncs 
>> improved to support the latest version of the Remote Framebuffer Protocol 
>> (RFC 6143). This would allow a standard VNC client to connect to a Plan 9 
>> terminal, support screen resizing, local mouse cursor, and deliver all key 
>> strokes and mouse chords accurately. VNC is optimized to work over a large 
>> variety of different networks including high latency links and it will 
>> therefore offer a better user experience than drawterm, especially over 
>> wireless. 
>> 
>> Kim
>> 
> 
> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink

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Re: [9fans] iOS drawterm

[Anthony Sorace]

VNC is great for what it is, and I certainly wouldn’t object to seeing vncs 
upgraded, but it is not a replacement for drawterm. It does not expose local 
devices in a plan 9 friendly way. In addition to just using drawterm as a 
straightforward terminal, an iOS version would be a very good platform for 
playing around with exposing other capabilities that the device has to plan 9. 
I played around with this a little bit with the original port. VNC buys us none 
of this.

> On Mar 25, 2020, at 04:21, Kim Lassila  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mar 25, 2020, at 8:19 AM, Anthony Sorace  wrote:
>> 
>> With iOS getting first-class mouse pointer support, I’m looking at the iOS 
>> drawterm port again. Has anyone touched this since the old GSoC project bit 
>> rotted out?
> 
> Drawterm is quite slow at reading and writing pixels on the screen. I learned 
> this when I started recording screen in Plan 9 
> (https://github.com/9d0/screencast). 
> 
> Instead of porting drawterm to different platforms I would like to see vncs 
> improved to support the latest version of the Remote Framebuffer Protocol 
> (RFC 6143). This would allow a standard VNC client to connect to a Plan 9 
> terminal, support screen resizing, local mouse cursor, and deliver all key 
> strokes and mouse chords accurately. VNC is optimized to work over a large 
> variety of different networks including high latency links and it will 
> therefore offer a better user experience than drawterm, especially over 
> wireless. 
> 
> Kim
> 
> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink

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[9fans] iOS drawterm

[Anthony Sorace]

With iOS getting first-class mouse pointer support, I’m looking at the iOS 
drawterm port again. Has anyone touched this since the old GSoC project bit 
rotted out?

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Re: [9fans] Did 9srv.net go offline?

[Anthony Sorace]

9srv was down for several days due to a hardware failure. It's mostly back now, 
although it's got significant stability issues.

I should also note that until I've resolved those, I've stopped adding new 
accounts. I'll let folks know when all is better.

Anthony

> On Feb 24, 2020, at 7:37 , Sergey Zhilkin  > wrote:
> 
> Works for me.
> 
> чт, 20 февр. 2020 г. в 07:48, V. M. (Mark) Haas  >:
> All -
> 
> I've been using 9srv.net  for some of my P9 activities. It 
> appears to no 
> longer be part of the DNS system.
> 
> Did I miss something and there was an announcement of it ending?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> --
> 9fans: 9fans
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>  
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> С наилучшими пожеланиями
> Жилкин Сергей
> With best regards
> Zhilkin Sergey
> 9fans / 9fans / see discussions + participants + delivery options Permalink

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Re: [9fans] Object Icon, drawterm, riox

[Anthony Sorace]

I get why someone might want those rio changes, even if they're not for me 
(although some I'm curious about). But can anyone help me understand why what 
they've done to drawterm is desirable? I can't say that resizing the window to 
change the scale factor has ever seemed like something I'd want. How do they 
use this?

> On Jan 4, 2020, at 3:04 , Mark van Atten  wrote:
> 
> For whomever may find this of interest -- the Object Icon project,
> mentioned on this list in passing in August 2018, also caters to Plan
> 9:
> 
> The Object Icon object-oriented programming language:
> http://objecticon.sourceforge.net/
> 
> Of wider use may be its version of drawterm
> http://objecticon.sourceforge.net/Drawterm.html
> and its (much) modified rio
> http://objecticon.sourceforge.net/Riox.html
> 
> Mark.

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Re: [9fans] moving 9fans to new server, but still 9fans@9fans.net

[Anthony Sorace]

Archived-At is from RFC 5064.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5064

The weird "=?UTF-8?B?" is an "Encoded Word", per RFC 2047. Email headers are 
defined to be 7-bit ASCII (yes, still); 2047 provides a way to encode other 
characters in email headers. Mind you, it looks like all the actual Archived-At 
links Topicbox would fit in 7-bit ASCII anyway and it'd be nice if they 
reserved the Encoded Word for when they needed it, but whatever; email is a 
mess and this is nice to have.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2047

Anthony

> On Oct 23, 2019, at 10:45 , Calvin Morrison  wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 23, 2019, at 8:03 AM, hiro wrote:
>> this is the case on any other mailing lists or only a topicbox-internal
>> standard...
> 
> Quite right. RFC2369 describes most of the standard headers you'll be used 
> to. However, I'm not aware of a permalink to web archives for each individual 
> post.
> 
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2369
> 
> Cheers,
> Calvin

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[9fans] Anything like 2e's road(7)?

[Anthony Sorace]

This isn't really a Plan 9 question at this point, but since we've been talking 
about 2e a bit:

2e included a program road(7), which allowed you to explore a US map database. 
It has a neat property where you can highlight individual features via regexp 
match. You could have a map containing only selected roads (say you wanted to 
show only the Interstates going into your city).

road(7) never got updated after 2e, and I don't know how to recreate the Tiger 
database it pulled from, regardless.

Anyone know of anything, on any platform, which does something similar? Show 
only selected elements on a road map?

[9fans] USB device mode?

[Anthony Sorace]

Has anyone done any work (successful or otherwise) towards getting Plan 9 to 
drive USB in device mode? If so, can you share any code or comments? This would 
be particularly useful on the Raspberry Pi Zero’s OTG interface, as a serial or 
HID device, but experiences with other versions of this would be helpful, too.

[9fans] Backblaze B2

[Anthony Sorace]

I'm considering adapting the S3 Venti to use Backblaze's B2. Has anyone done 
anything interesting (i.e. Plan 9 related) with B2?

Re: [9fans] DKIM with upas

[Anthony Sorace]

Where you've put it seems like the right place to me.

Acme Mail is doing the wrong thing here. It should respect $upasname for
this purpose, like marshal does. I think this is just a change to mesgsend in
/acme/mail/src/reply.c; unlike marshal, don't overwrite user, but just wrap
"fprint(ofd, "From: %s\n", user);" with a check for $upasname being set.

I'm interested in using your DKIM thing, too, so thanks. :-)


> On Jan 29, 2018, at 10:58 , Dave MacFarlane  wrote:
> 
> I started hosting my personal domain's email on 9front and wanted to
> sign my outgoing emails with a DKIM, so I wrote something in Go that
> reads a message from stdin and writes a DKIM signed version to stdout
> (https://github.com/driusan/dkim).
> 
> I was planning on using it in /mail/lib/remotemail by having the final
> "exec smtp [...]" replaced by " exec dkimsign [...] | upas/smtp [...]"
> and that works with marshal (if I ensure that I add all the headers
> that I'm signing manually), but not acme.
> 
> From what I can tell, acme always uses a From line of "From:
> localname" (overriding any that you manually specified), and expects
> upas/smtp to add in the domain, which is causing the signature to fail
> after smtp modifies the signed header. (marshal leaves any headers
> that you manually specify unmolested, so the signature is valid as
> long as you include a fully qualified From: line while writing the
> message.)
> 
> Is there a better place/way to do the signing? Ideally I could sign it
> as the last thing it does before going out over the wire, but at the
> very least I need to sign it after expanding the addresses. (The
> standard says I also need to do the hashing before smtp dot stuffing,
> but I can take care of that with a flag on the Go side..) The best I
> can think of is some convoluted mix of "upas/smtp -f .domainname |
> dkimsign | [some script that undoes most of what upas/smtp -f did ] |
> upas/smtp", but I have a feeling I'm just missing some better place to
> do the signing from.
> 
> - Dave

[9fans] QIC-80

[Anthony Sorace]

This is a bit of personal archeology, but has anyone read QIC-80 tapes on 
Plan9? If so, using what hardware?

Re: [9fans] Maintenance of an auth server files vs a dns+dhcp+tftp server

[Anthony Sorace]

I'm not sure there's a single "canonical" answer, but many installations have 
run the auth server off its own file system, as James originally described. 
It's been several years now so my memory could be fuzzy, but I believe this is 
what they did at the main Bell Labs installation. 

> On Nov 15, 2016, at 14:05, Stanley Lieber  wrote:
> 
> "James A. Robinson"  wrote:
> 
>> So in a canonical installation the auth server mounts its root from the
>> file server?
>> 
>>> On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 10:47 AM Stanley Lieber  wrote:
>>> 
>>> The idea is that there is one file system shared by all the
>> neighboring
>>> systems. The canonical Plan 9 installation comprises one disk file
>> server
>>> and many diskless computing machines (auth servers, cpu servers,
>> terminals).
>>> 
> 
> Yes. You can arrange for hands-free booting by storing  the same 
> authid/authdom/password in the nvram of both the file server and the auth 
> server. I usually boot the auth server from a 9fat partition or a USB key, 
> then tcp (actually, tls) mount the root file system from the file server.
> 
> sl
> 

Re: [9fans] acme tag bars stacking

[Anthony Sorace]

I’ve often wanted the same sorting change. I do, however, find yiyus’ rationale 
compelling. I’d be interested in playing with it, if you try it out.

> On Oct 30, 2016, at 11:16 , Mathieu Lonjaret  
> wrote:
> 
> yeah, good points.
> 
> On 29 October 2016 at 00:47, yy  wrote:
>> On 28 October 2016 at 16:23, Mathieu Lonjaret
>>  wrote:
>>> Anyway, does anyone know what the rationale was for choosing to stack
>>> them at the bottom? Or why it would be a a bad idea to make them stack
>>> at the top instead?
>> 
>> Let's suppose you have many windows in a column. When you work in one
>> of them, you B2 it and put it on the top of the stack. Then you work
>> on another one and it goes to the top, moving the previous one to the
>> second position, and so on. This way, your most recently used windows
>> are always on top, the least used ones go to the bottom of the stack.
>> I would find counterintuitive that the windows you used a longer time
>> ago stayed at the top, between your "working windows" and the column
>> and main tag lines.
>> 
>> But I would guess the main reason it works this way is that it seemed
>> more natural to move a window to the head than to the tail of a linked
>> list, and it just worked well enough.
>> 
>> I see how it may be more practical to stack them at the top when
>> working only with two or three windows, but it would be kind of weird
>> if you have ten. If you feel it will fit your workflow better, it is
>> probably not too difficult to get it done.
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> - yiyus || JGL .
>> 

[9fans] Pi Hats and i2c

[Anthony Sorace]

Anyone have any example code using the i2c interface on the pi I can look at? 
I'm playing around with several of these, and am not getting the results I 
expect (data getting out, but the hats aren't behaving like they're getting the 
same bits I think I'm sending).

More generally, anyone got any of these hats going? I'm starting off with the 
Sense Hat, since it exposes everything on it via the i2c.

[9fans] Wireless on the Pi?

[Anthony Sorace]

Anyone got anything? USB dongle we can drive, or an ethernet bridge folks have 
had good results with? WiFi with WPA2 is ideal, but the only hard requirement 
for my use case is power: it needs to either draw directly or be able to draw 
power via USB.

Re: [9fans] Pi updates

[Anthony Sorace]

Wow, that’s amazing timing. I was reading about SPI on
the Pi, considering getting one of those TFT displays,
closed the window to head to bed, and there’s your
message. This is super useful, thanks. And yes, I’d be
interested in seeing your slides, although you’ve already
given me enough to keep my busy for a bit.

Anthony

Re: [9fans] Compiling ken-cc on Linux

[Anthony Sorace]

Brantley wrote:

> One could argue that the Plan 9 C compiler lacks the modern optimizations 
> that the other compilers have. This would be true. But I would argue that 
> almost all of those optimizations are either not needed...

Note the "almost all" in there. It's important not to get dogmatic about such 
things. The argument isn't that kencc is at precisely the perfect point on the 
simplicity-vs-optimization spectrum, but that it's pretty darn close, closer 
that known alternatives, and errs on the safer side. Likely there are 
optimizations or features in newer chipsets that would be worth supporting, but 
even so: we've got a long way to go before hitting gcc/clang levels.

Re: [9fans] Two faces(1) derivatives

[Anthony Sorace]

I thought about doing something like gravatar, but it’s not well-used
among my social or professional circles, either, outside of a few forums.
Still, I’d be interested in seeing what you did. I think it’d be neat to have
‘gravatarfs’, which you could mount (or not) under /lib/face, and have it
construct the .dict and face files as needed. No changes to faces needed,
anything which know how to look through that tree already benefits.

Anthony

Re: [9fans] Two faces(1) derivatives

[Anthony Sorace]

Two things came up while working on this:

1) Does anyone know what Infolines, in main.c, is/was used for?

2) Figuring out how far down to move a line of text seems more
manual than it should be, and I don’t understand how to do it in a
way that’s good for most fonts. Am I missing something?

Re: [9fans] Web Gardens

[Anthony Sorace]

I had never heard this term before, but this is perfect. Well done.

> I thought a web garden was a hobbyist version of a server farm.

Re: [9fans] Harvey OS: A new OS inspired heavily by Plan 9

[Anthony Sorace]

 erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net wrote:
 
 when i need to run Linux programs, i run linux.

Yeah, but then you’ve got linux. Now you’ve got two
problems (hah! if only…).

 what is the benefit of running firefox on a p9 like system,
 rather than on linux?

The theory, anyway, is that you could then not have a linux
(or whatever) system. If the emulation bit could be self-
contained enough, a plan9 system with linuxemu would
have a significantly lower maintenance burden than a plan9
system plus a linux system. In theory.

I’ve never understood why the emulation effort picked
linux, though. It seems like the worst possible thing to be
emulating, and I don’t imagine the software support for the
sort of things we’re talking about (for many, it’s pretty
much just a browser) is all that different between Linux and,
say, FreeBSD. Are there a bunch of linux-only apps people
would like to have?

Re: [9fans] plumber support for python lookup

[Anthony Sorace]

 On Aug 20, 2013, at 11:03 , Anthony Sorace a...@9srv.net wrote:
 
 I'm in the middle of a medium-size python project. It would be
 really helpful if the plumber could do things like look up things
 in python's dot notation. Anyone have plumbing rules or helper
 functions they'd like to share for python work with acme and
 plumber on p9p?

I don’t think I ever shared what I came up with for this, and it’s come up on 
IRC a few times, so:

I wrote a script, apy [1], which takes arguments of a directory “wdir” and a 
python function “app.file.function, tries to find app/file in wdir or its 
parents, and plumbs the result.

Then this simple plumbing rule
# Find python modules.
type is text
data matches '([0-9A-Za-z]*)\.([0-9A-Za-z]*)\.([0-9A-Za-z]*)'
plumb start apy $wdir $0
will let me click on foo.bar.function names in my project and Acme will get me 
to the named function.

It’s very simplistic (in particular, it only bothers with functions and doesn’t 
really do anything about system modules unless you get lucky), but gets me 90% 
of what I wanted Acme to do for me when working with python. It’s particularly 
nice when looking at Django’s urls.py and treating it as an index.

I think I’m doing something silly with the newline trimming; if anyone wants to 
point out what I’m missing, I’d love to hear it.

Anthony

[1] /n/sources/contrib/anothy/bin/unix/apy

Re: [9fans] replace p9sk1 with something better(9front)

[Anthony Sorace]

Personally, I think two separate things are called for.

1) A straight-forward update to use AES
2) Some public key system.

The p9sk1 *model* is great, and it'd be a real shame to drop it. Doing the 
upgrade and teaching should be easy, although there's tedious work in telling 
all the things to start using it,
The fun/interesting parts live in that second one, though. Lots of questions, 
starting with deciding if something existing might make sense to import 
(Inferno's public key system is the obvious first thing to look at there, but 
its details are dusty in my head). Public key systems have different enough 
properties that it'd be good to have both, in cases where one or the other fits 
the use case better.

[9fans] Darksky

[Anthony Sorace]

I love that Weather Underground is still offering a telnet
interface, but I wanted a bit more control over what I get
back. I was also trying to get familiar with the nice JSON
library bedo did[1], so I wrote up a Darksky client. Get an
API key of your own[2] and stick it in $home/lib/darksky,
and you can ask for whatever combination of detail or
summary data for current conditions, minute-by-minute,
hour-by-hour, or day-by-day data you like. It’ll also print
any weather alerts in effect for your location.

The precipitation graph is maybe a little silly (the unicode
block drawing stuff doesn’t provide great granularity).

Source in /n/sources/contrib/anothy/src/cmd/darksky.c;
man in /n/sources/contrib/anothy/lib/man/darksky.1.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/bedo/9son
[2] https://developer.forecast.io/register

Re: [9fans] Darksky

[Anthony Sorace]

 I'm very pleased to see my library being of use ☺.  I wrote it for a
 flickr 9p server, which has probably bitrotted a bit by now.

And I’m very happy to have it; thanks! I haven’t tried rebuilding flickrfs 
recently, but it still gets at my flickr account (just tried it). I had 
forgotten that it was related. My next target is Twitter.

I saw a blog post that you were working on a dropbox thingie at some point; you 
ever get anywhere with that?

[9fans] p9p's stats

[Anthony Sorace]

Two things on stats:

1) The load figures on OS X seem to be mostly useless: they indicate the 
machine is pretty much constantly pegged, when it’s really mostly idle (as per 
’top’ and Activity Monitor). Are other people seeing this, as well?
(Results on FreeBSD and Linux match my expectations.)

2) I’m interested in backporting p9p’s auxstats to plan9, so I can monitor my 
cpu server in the same stats window as I’m monitoring a FreeBSD host. Before I 
get started, has anyone attempted this?

Anthony

[9fans] USB-to-parallel?

[Anthony Sorace]

Anyone done usb-to-parallel under Plan 9?
If so, model and/or code?

Re: [9fans] Trying to override 'cd' command

[Anthony Sorace]

It works:

: root; fn cd {builtin cd $* ; prompt=(': '`{pwd}^'; ' '')}
: root; cd
: /usr/a; cd /tmp
: /tmp; 

If you’re still having trouble, paste a transcript like that, so we can see 
what’s going on.

Note also that spaces in file names will screw up the easy version of this. If 
you’re on a filesystem that likes such things, you might instead want something 
like this:

: /Library/Desktop; pwd
/Library/Desktop Pictures
: /Library/Desktop; fn cd {builtin cd $* ; cwd=`{pwd} ; prompt=(': 
'$cwd^'; ' '')}
: /Library/Desktop; cd .
: /Library/Desktop Pictures; 



 On Jun 12, 2015, at 17:05 , Ryan Gonzalez rym...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Thanks for replying! Unfortunately, that doesn't change anything. Still stuck 
 at the 'term% ' prompt.
 

Re: [9fans] fossil+venti performance question

[Anthony Sorace]

The reason, in general:
In a fossil+venti setup, fossil runs (basically) as a
cache for venti. If your access just hits fossil, it’ll
be quick; if not, you hit the (significantly slower)
venti. I bet if you re-run the same test twice in a
row, you’re going to see dramatically improved
performance. Try it. If that’s true, the question is
really one of venti performance; if not, you may
have another system config issue.

There are various changes you can make to how
venti uses disk/memory that can speed things up,
but I don’t have a good handle on which to
suggest first.

Your write performance in that test isn’t really
relevant: they’re not hitting the file system at all.

I’m not sure why you’d see a difference in a
fossil+venti setup of a different size, but the
partition size relationships, and the in-memory
cache size relationships, are what’s mostly important.

a

[9fans] Why didn't anyone tell me about the new slogan?

[Anthony Sorace]

http://t.co/qyvHkuP2m8

Sounds a bit pollyanna to me, but who am I to judge?

[9fans] Portable NAT-busting reverse-proxy

[Anthony Sorace]

I have a web service that runs localhost-only on my laptop which I'd sometimes 
like to make available on the public internet. The service listens on port 
8000. The laptop moves around periodically, is usually behind a NAT, and is 
sometimes offline. Here's how I do it.

1) In Inferno on my laptop, I export my local network stack:
listen -Av 'tcp!*!' {export /net}
(This whole setup would've been way simpler if drawterm exported the network 
stack like Inferno does. Does it on any platform?)

2) On my Plan 9 cpu server, I have a service which looks something like this 
(at, say, /rc/bin/service/tcp1234):
#!/bin/rc
echo -n 0  /srv/remotenet
There's a bit more going on in the real version of this, but this version 
works. Thanks to qrstuv on irc for a reminder of the echo -n 0  /srv/foo 
trick mentioned here:
http://9fans.net/archive/2007/04/130

3) Also on my cpu server, I have a service which looks like this (call it 
/rc/bin/service/tcp4321):
#!/bin/rc

mount /srv/remotenet /n/remnet
netd=/n/remnet
host=localhost

aux/trampoline $netd^/tcp!^$host^!8000
Again, more logging  error checking in the real thing, but this should work 
as-is (I have a fallback for if /srv/remotenet can't be mounted, when the 
laptop is offline).

4) Finally, on my laptop I run:
trampoline -a 'tcp!localhost!' tcp!my-cpuserver!1234
Getting trampoline running under p9p was trivial: I just removed the mac 
checking bits. I'm not sure why p9p doesn't have the needed cs bits in the 
header files (the code seems to be there).

The p9p trampoline connects the 9p service provided by Inferno on my laptop to 
the tcp1234 listener on my cpu server, which posts a service to /srv which the 
listener on 4321 mounts on each call and then uses as a network stack for its 
own trampoline. The end result is that web requests to my cpu server port 4321 
get forwarded to localhost:8000 on my laptop, and I can re-establish this with 
just the p9p trampoline call. I have not attempted to authenticate any of the 
p9 connections, which I'd want to do if I were putting this into production 
service.

In addition to trampoline being so nice and the echo -n 0 trick (which never 
sticks in my head for some reason), it's fun to note that there's nothing 
special about /net* directories; trampoline will use an IP stack anywhere you 
point it to.

I'll stick versions of this up on sources once I polish a bit or two.
Anthony

[9fans] Plan 9 not selected for GSoC

[Anthony Sorace]

Unfortunately, we were not selected as one of the
mentoring orgs in GSoC this year. I'm going to try
and make the meeting for rejected orgs on Friday
(I'll be traveling, but should be able to make it)
and will hopefully get some insight into why then.
I'll report back any interesting findings.

If you're a student who'd been hoping to work with
us in GSoC, I'd point out that there's no real reason
to wait on that program - we're always happy to
have new folks interested and contributing. Feel
free the reach out if you want pointers on getting
started. And if you're set on GSoC for the summer,
you should absolutely check out the other 137
participating orgs:

https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/list/public/google/gsoc2015

Thanks to everyone who contributed ideas or gave
feedback during the process.
Anthony

Re: [9fans] announce radio HLS and drawterm question

[Anthony Sorace]

9p access to resources on foreign systems has always been a good target for 
GSoC, whether that be in drawterm, Inferno, or via other means. We've had 
several projects in this category over the years, and would certainly love to 
see more.

If you're going to troll, I'd appreciate it if you'd avoid topics that might 
genuinely confuse prospective students.


 On Feb 26, 2015, at 12:41, Aram Hăvărneanu ara...@mgk.ro wrote:
 
 On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 6:04 PM, Jeff Sickel j...@corpus-callosum.com 
 wrote:
 That would be a good GSOC project.
 
 I haven't realized OS X has a GSoC now.
 
 -- 
 Aram Hăvărneanu

[9fans] Google Summer of Code 2015

[Anthony Sorace]

(Resending (with tweaks) to get around moderation.)

Things are underway for this summer. The org application period is open, 
closing tomorrow, and ours is in, with a few tweaks pending. A few things to 
note, the first one could use lots of help:

• As always, the most important part of the application is the ideas page. This 
year's is at:

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/gsoc-2015-ideas/index.html

I've just started updating it, and there's plenty to do. If you have an idea 
you'd be possibly willing to mentor or backup-mentor, *please* add it here. 
Provide enough detail that an interested student could get a decent idea of the 
scope of the project and what's involved. The more relevant information you can 
provide, the better. If the info for that project gets larger than a paragraph, 
it probably makes sense to create a wiki page dedicated to the idea; see the 
idea Replace language for wikifs for a good example of that. If the wiki is a 
challenge, email me what the entry should be and I'll take care of it.

In the GSoC feedback sessions every year, this page is always the main thing 
used to separate various otherwise-promising orgs out. Take a look.

• If you travel in circles with students, start telling them about the program 
and why they should want to work with us. You might point them at our Student 
Expectations, at

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/GSoC_Student_Expectations/index.html
I'm reviewing those, but I don't expect significant changes.

• If you're an established community member, consider whether you'd be 
interested in mentoring. Take a look at our Mentor's Expectations at

http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/GSoC_Mentor_Expectations/index.html
and feel free to ask me or anyone else who's participated in the past questions 
- I'm sure everyone would be willing to talk.

• Prior-year mentors, it would be particularly helpful if you could take a look 
at those two previous pages and let me know (via the plan9-gsoc group 
preferably, or off-list) if you think anything needs changing. I think these 
expectations (which are more or less the same as the past 2-3 years, with small 
refinements) have served us pretty well, but would obviously be interested in 
other opinions.

• Also, if you're not on them and would like to contribute actively, we have 
two relevant Google Groups worth joining: plan9-gsoc and plan9-gsoc-mentors. 
The mentor's list is for mentors, backup mentors, and similar folks helping 
out; the other list is for anyone interested in helping out or following along 
on the GSoC-specific discussions more closely.

Let me know if you have any other questions. If you have real-time questions, 
I'm in #plan9 and #plan9-gsoc most of the time.
Anthony


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Re: [9fans] wstat and atomic directory change

[Anthony Sorace]

 On Jan 30, 2015, at 10:59 , Giacomo Tesio giac...@tesio.it wrote:
 
 It surely would not be conformant to Plan 9 systems, but to the protocol?

No. Joel has it right. Writing a server which allows / in names would mean that 
the / you're slipping into a name wouldn't always be a directory indicator or 
name separator. Think of it as the protocol accommodating systems which use 
some other marker.

The relevant point is that the name in question (which, as you noticed, the 
protocol allows to contain / even though plan9 doesn't) is the name *within a 
directory*, not a full path name. walk(5) probably gives the best explanation 
of this, or perhaps the discussion of create in open(5).

Re: [9fans] OLPC machines

[Anthony Sorace]

There is at least somewhat more current work than that.

Tim Newsham was working on a port in 2010. It booted, but was limited (iirc, no 
networking and some graphics problems). The files from that on my system are 
dated 2012, but I think that's just from me being careless when I moved 
something in that year. The Contrib Index [1] reports that tristan did some 
sort of update to newsham's work, but I don't believe I tracked those changes. 
I'm not sure what the relationship was between newsham's work and the original 
GSoC project.

The XO1 still sort of a neat machine, although obviously things have moved on a 
bit since 2007. The weird stuff they do with their screen is interesting; looks 
way better greyscale than color.

[1] http://www.plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Contrib_index/index.html

Re: [9fans] More kbmap information

[Anthony Sorace]

I don't think kbmap is going to give you what you want here. It's a really easy 
way to set the non-modifier keys, but which modifier keys do what is built into 
the underlying code. I don't think what you're after would be too challenging, 
though; start by taking a look at /sys/src/9/pc/kbd.c (assuming you're running 
a stock 32-bit kernel), in particular the kbdputsc function.

That said, after taking a look at the specific keyboard layout you've 
described, I'd suggest living with the Plan 9 compose system for a while first. 
Most folks have found it remarkably comfortable, at least if your primary 
language doesn't vastly exceed what's on a keyboard (Japanese c). I know I 
miss it when I'm on every other system.

Anthony

[9fans] 9p on iOS?

[Anthony Sorace]

I have a project for which I need 9p on iOS. Anyone have an Objective C module 
that'll do that, or experience fitting in a C library? I'm looking for 
something much more self-contained than what's found in the drawterm port.

Re: [9fans] FUSE on Plan9

[Anthony Sorace]

On Dec 12, 2014, at 05:49, Jens Staal staal1...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 Would this theoretically work? The advantage of FUSE is access to a number of 
 popular file systems (most notably ext4, NTFS, ZFS) and also many special-
 purpose file systems.

It's been a few years since I really looked at fuse, so I could be 
misremembering things, but wouldn't you then have the port the individual plugs 
into each system anyway? Fuse gives you an interconnect, but not all of that 
functionality automatically. It's narrower then NDIS, which is nice, but I 
don't know how much it's going to buy you on its own.

Re: [9fans] FUSE on Plan9

[Anthony Sorace]

What might be more interesting is a 9pfuse, analogous to davfuse (thus the 
opposite of the thing in p9p now), running on Unix. That way you have a high 
probability of working with the existing fuse plugs, without having to do any 
porting work there, and plan 9 systems can still get at them. It's not quite as 
convenient as having it natively on plan 9, but could produce really good bang 
for your buck.


 On Dec 12, 2014, at 05:49, Jens Staal staal1...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 This might not be popular among most Plan9 users, but I started thinking 
 about 
 the possibility of FUSE on Plan9 after seeing the FUSE on WebDAV [1] project.
 At least on 9front, WebDAV should be integrated in webfs.
 
 Would this theoretically work? The advantage of FUSE is access to a number of 
 popular file systems (most notably ext4, NTFS, ZFS) and also many special-
 purpose file systems. 
 
 It feels a bit round-about and wasteful to go via webfs, so I guess the most 
 appropriate method would be to implement a FUSE library directly on top of 9P 
 instead of the kernel VFS - possibly by porting the NetBSD 
 librefuse/libperfused [2] or the OpenBSD libfuse [3]. The disadvantage with 
 this approach is that I am far too inexperienced and have far too little time 
 to actually attempt this.
 
 What are your thoughts? Should I try to get the fuse-on-webdav working on 
 Plan9? Any other attempts with a more proper port/implementation already 
 ongoing?
 
 1. https://github.com/rianhunter/davfuse
 2. http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?perfused+8+NetBSD-6.0
 3. http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=articlesid=20131108082749
 

Re: [9fans] advice? fossil+venti (p9), vbackup+venti (p9p) vs. some other means of backup

[Anthony Sorace]

 Does anybody rely on a backup scheme using, say,
 vbackup+venti on linux? Does it work well, or would
 you recomment other means of doing a backup?

Not precisely what you're asking, but likely close enough experience to be 
useful:

When last I was responsible for a bunch of unix boxes, I was using venti for 
backup. I started off using vbackup, but switched to something vac-based pretty 
quickly. I realized there was a ton of data on there that I didn't feel the 
need to keep backed up (the OS itself, but more significantly nearly a TB of 
transcoded video (we kept the source backed up)). Also, I don't think I could 
get at the vbackup images from Plan 9; the vac ones work fine, with some 
oddities based on file system differences. These were OS X systems, but I was 
just using stock p9p stuff; it should run fine on linux. I was sending to a 
remote venti running on Plan 9.

Using vac instead of vbackup increases your recovery time (you have to 
reinstall the OS  tools, and in my case we'd have to re-transcode the video), 
but we had a warm spare and RAID to guard agains simple disk failures; this was 
mostly for genuine disaster recovery (although being able to mount and cd 
around my backup history from my Plan 9 workstation was a huge benefit).

I also ran something similar on my laptop. I've stopped using that regularly in 
favor of Time Machine, but still use it as an occasional one-off for disaster 
recovery (although it's not off-site).

 I guess there are also people using fossil+venti on
 p9. Are those happy?

Yes, quite. Ever since someone (Richard Miller, I think) tracked down that 
persistent snapshot hang bug, it's been great. Most of the complaining about 
fossil's stability comes from outdated info. The fossil+venti combo isn't the 
fastest option (Erik's kenfs kicks ass there), but the tradeoffs work well for 
my needs.

 I am looking for a sustainable means of backup,
 mainly on linux, and am avaluating different options
 (rdiff-backup, rsnapshot, dump/restore, rdup...)

I would use this system again if I had unix servers I cared about. For my 
MacBook, Time Machine gets the edge mostly because it's automatic.

This is not quite the latest version, but you can take a look at 
/n/sources/contrib/anothy/bin/rc/vacbak. You can also take a look at 
.../anothy/lib/tet.(cron files xfiles) for examples of config files I used on a 
system called tet.

You're reminding me I've been meaning to come up with an off-site backup plan 
for my system, which I haven't had in a few years...

Re: [9fans] golang on 9atom

[Anthony Sorace]

The error is what it says: the file name (rather than the full path) is too 
long for your file server. It sounds like you're running kfs, which is the 
oldest and most restricted of our general purpose options. Long-term, I suggest 
migrating, although if you're on a single-system setup and already have data 
you care about, that can be a pain. In the short-term, check out lnfs(4) to get 
around this issue.


 On Dec 1, 2014, at 10:11, Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan r...@rkrishnan.org 
 wrote:
 
 I do not remember getting this error in the Labs version. But on 9atom
 with kfs, I get a build error while compiling golang 1.3.3 from the
 source:
 
 go tool dist: create
 /usr/ram/src/go/src/pkg/runtime/zruntime_defs_plan9_amd64.go:
 '/usr/ram/src/ amd64.go' name too long
 
 I remember getting this error on 9atom before too, but had forgotten to
 report it.

Re: [9fans] running plan9 : an ideal setup?

[Anthony Sorace]

On Nov 25, 2014, at 1:59 , Bakul Shah ba...@bitblocks.com wrote:

 As long as you run IP, you pay the other costs for any protocol.

But there's plenty of cases where you don't need even that. See AOE, or nonet 
from very early Plan 9. I'd like that back.

 If you use TCP you benefit from its near universality, dealing
 with long fat pipes, bandwidth adjustment, selective ack etc.

Those are all valid reasons to have a tcp/ip stack. But what I (and I believe 
Erik) say is that there's cases where that doesn't matter, and it would be nice 
to have an alternative in those cases. I no that IL makes a noticeable (if 
tiny) difference on my local network; I bet nonet would be a marginally greater 
difference.

Re: [9fans] running plan9 : an ideal setup?

[Anthony Sorace]

On Nov 21, 2014, at 9:34 , erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net wrote:
 
 this is not correct.  tcp doesn't help at all when the wire is fast (short, 
 fat).  it's the classic tradeoff of cpu
 for (networking) performance.  the wire being fast enough is an argument 
 against using tcp,
 not for it.

I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. I'm not saying that tcp helps, 
or doesn't have overhead, with fast pipes. I'm saying that the pipes are fast 
enough that in most use cases, at least for me, the pipe is fast enough that 
((wire speed) - (tcp/ip overhead)) is still plenty fast.

Re: [9fans] running plan9 : an ideal setup?

[Anthony Sorace]

Both. I agree with what you're saying about the computers, but I was thinking 
of the fact that the wire speed is fast enough in most cases that the tcp/ip 
overhead doesn't impact things noticeably for most uses. There are outliers in 
both cases, of course.

 On Nov 20, 2014, at 9:37 , erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net wrote:
 
 On Thu Nov 20 01:02:53 EST 2014, a...@9srv.net wrote:
 I can't speak for Erik's cec-as-nonet setup specifically, but I've wanted 
 nonet (or an equivalent) many, many times. Networks are fast enough that 
 tcp/ip overhead isn't really something that hurts in most cases, but it does 
 exist.
 
 anthony, i'm sure your fingers just got crossed up, but i think you ment
 computers are fast enough that the overhead doesn't matter.
 
 - erik

Re: [9fans] running plan9 : an ideal setup?

[Anthony Sorace]

I can't speak for Erik's cec-as-nonet setup specifically, but I've wanted nonet 
(or an equivalent) many, many times. Networks are fast enough that tcp/ip 
overhead isn't really something that hurts in most cases, but it does exist.

Also, I really want to exercise the cross-network parts of Plan 9.

 On Nov 19, 2014, at 10:34 , Aram Hăvărneanu ara...@mgk.ro wrote:
 
 On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 3:36 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net wrote:
 by the way, at one point i had a hacked up kernel which allowed me to
 mount a file server over the cec protocol.
 
 In what situation would this be useful?
 
 -- 
 Aram Hăvărneanu

Re: [9fans] running plan9 : an ideal setup?

[Anthony Sorace]

 On Nov 19, 2014, at 5:36 , lu...@proxima.alt.za wrote:
 
 Is there an easy way to determine when a Fossil/Venti service was
 first deployed?  I have a feeling my specific installation is a good
 few years old and I'm pretty sure any problem that may have arisen
 could not have been hard to fix.
 
 Just as a guideline:
 
 ripple# hget 'http://127.1:8000/storage'

Ask for /index instead of /storage. Each arena line will give you a 
created=xxx tag, where xxx is a timestamp. You could do an awk script to 
give you growth over time, if you like.

Re: [9fans] Persistent font in Acme.

[Anthony Sorace]

 So, you could make a script $home/bin/rc/a:
 
 curious choise.  not that you'd want to use this anymore, but ...

He meant the : as punctuation in the english sense, not part of the command 
name. See later where he says ..just typing a..

Clearly we should all be sending properly marked-up html messages to 9fans... 
;-)

Re: [9fans] reattach to a rio session

[Anthony Sorace]

 After closing drawterm, how do I re-connect to its rio to see again windows 
 which were started before? How do I reattach a window running e.g. 'rc' from 
 other login session to the current?

Short answer:
You can pre-arrange for this to work with command-line tools. Except in 
a very limited sense, you can't do this with graphical tools.

Long answer:
There are various ways to set up an rc session (or any command-line 
tool) so that you can reattach later, but you need to arrange for that ahead of 
time. The simplest, using all tools which come with the system, is probably 
running:
srv -e 'rc' whatever
and then using con /srv/whatever to connect to it later. I use this for a few 
system services, as it has the fewest moving parts, but it's imperfect 
(especially for a shell), because local echo won't always be what you expect, 
you can't get at the file descriptors in all the ways you might like, multiple 
readers/writers will get screwed up, c.

A good solution which is much more flexible and general, but somewhat 
more involved to set up and learn, is hubfs, available from contrib. See here:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/Hubfs/index.html

As far as I'm aware, there isn't an existing way to do this with 
graphical programs. Hubfs will allow you to do it in some very limited ways, 
but it's almost certainly not what you're after.

In cases where this manner of persistence really matters, we have VNC, 
although that's obviously unsatisfactory on other fronts. The group at LSUB was 
doing some great work with a plan 9 way of accomplishing this goal in Octopus 
(http://lsub.org/ls/octopus.html); I don't believe they're still working on 
that, though.

Anthony

Re: [9fans] Setting up Mail in Acme on the Raspberry Pi.

[Anthony Sorace]

 I've been looking through the documentation and
 the 9fans archive but I can't get a clear answer on
 what to replace localhost.localdomain with.

If the recipient's mail server is being strict (but within
the bounds of the RFCs), that name is expected to be
the real, externally-resolvable DNS name of the
system you're sending from. The RFCs used to be more
lax on that point, and some servers still are, but you
shouldn't assume you'll be able to send to arbitrary
endpoints unless you satisfy that.

Re: [9fans] Yosemite

[Anthony Sorace]

On Oct 18, 2014, at 1:52 , andrey mirtchovski mirtchov...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 fwiw, p9p's acme has worked fine in full screen for me on all yosemite
 previews and the current release.

Have you rebuilt on it? mk seems unhappy (aborting in some cases).

Re: [9fans] kencc benchmark vs gcc

[Anthony Sorace]

There have been many over the years (I think the original papers present 
something), but I've not seen anything current enough to be useful. The very 
short version: gcc almost always produces faster executables from the same code.

Re: [9fans] Setting up Mail in Acme on the Raspberry Pi.

[Anthony Sorace]

The mail I mostly read from Plan 9 is hosted on Plan 9, but I've done IMAP with 
it as well.

-- Running imap with multiple mboxes (folders or whatever) did not work
for me (only one of them was updated).

This is almost certainly a configuration issue. It's not exactly clear what you 
mean by wasn't updated, but I can't think of anything that matches my 
experience. Setup with plumber, faces, c can take some thought up front, 
though.

-- Threading did not work properly.

Folks have put this into the readers, but I don't use it and haven't evaluated 
it.

-- When something went wrong during 'sending' from acme Mail, I did not
get any information that the mail had not been sent. So actually I always
had to control sending an email from, say, gmail's web interface.
(Or had to look manually into the logs.) That's a pretty bad behaviour.

That is bad behavior. I haven't observed (n)upas to be any worse in that regard 
than any other system I've used, though. Upas maybe provides one or two more 
places for the handoff to go wonky, but there's always a handoff that can go 
bad.

Regardless, if this is coming up with *any* regularity, I again suspect a 
configuration issue.

-- You can't easily search within all mail like you can using gmail
(for anything in the body, withing given dates, from somebody,
combinations, etc.

True. I wrote Mg (http://9fans.net/archive/2008/11/647) to offset some of these 
deficiencies, but modern interfaces are well ahead here.

-- I don't know how to correctly 'forward' an email from within acme Mail.

If you just care about sending the content on, open the message, edit the first 
line to who you want it to go to, hit Post. Fastest method, although you're 
tweaking the original. If you'd rather the original message be included 
unmolested, open the message, hit Reply, edit the address, hit Post.

-- the fact that gmail helps you to fill addresses when writing an email
is extremely handy and useful.

Agreed.

That's just a few things.

The main thing for me that prevents me from using it for more of my mail is the 
lack of a good HTML formatter. I occasionally get mail I actually care about 
(and often get mail that I don't) where the formatting matters. It's rare 
enough that I can punt that to other devices and have it be okay, but common 
enough that it's distracting.

Configuration, especially when all you're doing is the client (IMAP) side, is 
more of a pain that most other options.





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Re: [9fans] audio device interface

[Anthony Sorace]

On Oct 14, 2014, at 5:57 , Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult 
enrico.weig...@gr13.net wrote:

 unfortunately, this doest contain any spec on the 9p interface.

The 9p interface is just 9p; there's nothing special for audio. Then audio(3) 
will answer your questions about what can be read from or written to each file.

 by the way: does it have any support for delays timestamps, etc?

audio(3) answers this (by omission). It describes what you can write to the 
files.



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Re: [9fans] Setting up Mail in Acme on the Raspberry Pi.

[Anthony Sorace]

Ruda:
Just now, I tried this:

: root; cd /mail/fs
: root; lf
ctl mbox/
: root; echo 'open /imap/mail.foo.org/anth...@foo.org box1'  ctl
: root; lf
box1/   ctl mbox/
: root; lf box1
1/  15/ 19/ 22/ 28/ 32/ 36/ 40/ 44/ 
48/ 52/ 56/ 60/ 64/ 68/ 71/ 75/ ctl
10/ 16/ 2/  23/ 29/ 33/ 37/ 41/ 45/ 
49/ 53/ 57/ 61/ 65/ 69/ 72/ 76/
11/ 17/ 20/ 24/ 30/ 34/ 38/ 42/ 46/ 
50/ 54/ 58/ 62/ 66/ 7/  73/ 8/
12/ 18/ 21/ 25/ 31/ 35/ 39/ 43/ 47/ 
51/ 55/ 59/ 63/ 67/ 70/ 74/ 9/
: root; echo 'open /imap/mail.foo.org/anth...@foo.org/Auction box2'  
ctl
: root; lf box2
1/  13/ 17/ 20/ 24/ 28/ 31/ 35/ 39/ 
42/ 46/ 5/  53/ 57/ 60/ 64/ 68/ 9/
10/ 14/ 18/ 21/ 25/ 29/ 32/ 36/ 4/  
43/ 47/ 50/ 54/ 58/ 61/ 65/ 69/ ctl
11/ 15/ 19/ 22/ 26/ 3/  33/ 37/ 40/ 
44/ 48/ 51/ 55/ 59/ 62/ 66/ 7/
12/ 16/ 2/  23/ 27/ 30/ 34/ 38/ 41/ 
45/ 49/ 52/ 56/ 6/  63/ 67/ 8/

After that, I can run Mail box1 and Mail box2 in Acme, and both are
updated as one would expect. Faces, which was started earlier and needs
to know about specific mailbox names to monitor, is not.

The message you cited implied you're doing this from p9p, not Plan 9. Is
that the case? That would be a big difference.



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Re: [9fans] Setting up Mail in Acme on the Raspberry Pi.

[Anthony Sorace]

On Oct 13, 2014, at 12:46 , Eduardo Alvarez astrochelon...@gmail.com wrote:

 Have you considered other mailbox formats, such as maildir, for instance? 
 Seems
 that it could solve at least some of the problem.

nupas uses a maildir-like format. It helps tremendously.

Really: if you're doing mail on Plan 9, you want to be running nupas.



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Re: [9fans] DNS/DHCP/AUTH with Raspberry Pi?

[Anthony Sorace]

On Oct 11, 2014, at 15:35 , brank...@hushmail.com wrote:

 It might be silly, but how about this:
 
 ISP router - Plan9 - Linux+P9P
 
 Mount the /net from Plan9 machine on the Linux machine, and add some iptables 
 rules.
 Do you think it will work?

Not without substantial development work (I'd bet more than simply putting NAT 
on Plan 9). Once you get Plan 9's /net on the linux box, nothing's going to 
know what to do with it. The existing p9p code won't use it directly, nor will 
iptables know how to send packets there.

If you want Plan 9 to do NAT, just do that.



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Re: [9fans] troff documentation link broken

[Anthony Sorace]

On Jul 28, 2014, at 11:58 , Carsten Kunze carsten.ku...@arcor.de wrote:
 
 If I'am able to reproduce a major issue should I report to the list? Or to 
 you? Or is there currently no maintenance of plan9 troff?

The best thing to do is submit a patch. Troff is maintained with the rest of 
the system. For more info on submitting a patch, see:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/1/patch



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Re: [9fans] Plan9 Sources Repository

[Anthony Sorace]

On Jul 19, 2014, at 8:02 , dante subscripti...@posteo.eu wrote:

 My whole argument goes about the following hypotheses:
 1. increasing the amount of contributions may not scale in the current model.

Okay, it *may* not. But we have no evidence of that. There's no indication that 
the current distribution model represents a scaling problem (it may represent a 
higher barrier to entry, but that's a different claim). I'm pretty convinced 
(from using the system, and having worked in shared environments using this 
model) that the limiting factor to scale is human attention.

 2. submitting trivial contributions is not trivial for the contributor.

While on Plan 9, it's pretty darn easy. I'll grant that it's not trivial if 
you're not on Plan 9. I'm not convinced that's worth spending much attention on 
fixing (I suspect we're likely to get better contributions from people using 
the system for real), but it is fixable without changing the model. It wouldn't 
be hard to write a patch(1) for plan9port. Go to town. But you'll want to do so 
after being familiar with the normal operation.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] file server speed

[Anthony Sorace]

On Jul 15, 2014, at 2:13 , kokam...@hera.eonet.ne.jp wrote:

 I've experienced three kinds of Plan9 file servers,
 Lab's one, 9atom and plan9front.

Can you clarify which file server, specifically, you're comparing for each of 
these? The Labs doesn't distribute kenfs any more, and venti+fossil is a very 
different model. The old kenfs should reliably trounce it on performance. Then 
there's newer options in both 9atom and 9front.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] Too many checkpages() diagnostics ...

[Anthony Sorace]

 I recall there used to me a mk target that would rebuild all the kernel 
 configs.  I.e. everything in CONFLIST.  It would be nice if that came back.

I believe 'mk all' in /sys/src/9/whatever will still do this.




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Re: [9fans] syscall 53

[Anthony Sorace]

Ron wrote:

 That said, the problems were due (IMHO) to a limitation in the
 update mechanism, not to the inclusion of a new system call.

This is true depending on how you define update mechanism.
A simple note from whoever made the decision to push the
change out to the effect of hey, we're going to add a new
syscall, update your kernels before pulling new binaries a
while before the push would have been sufficient.

 I think it's a good time to review how the update path works
 and fix it.

Again, I agree, provided that definition's broad enough to
include the communication channel. We've gotten notices of
potentially disruptive changes here in the past, and that's been
fine (even if the disruption is inconvenient for some). Without
that sort of communication, doing actual pulls from sources
(regardless of the technical mechanism used) seems dangerous.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] [GSOC] plan9 which arch code to use?

[Anthony Sorace]

  Why is this controversial?

Because you're missing the point, and arguing against a position nobody holds.

Absolutely nobody here is suggesting that everyone going off and doing their 
own thing and keeping the results to themselves is better than everyone going 
off and doing their own thing and releasing the results.

What some folks are suggesting is that some coordination would yield better 
results; that we can do better than the everyone going off and doing their own 
thing part of the above scenarios.

I believe Erik's point about falling into disrepair is that if everyone is 
spending time fixing the same issues, each on their own without any 
coordination, is that the resulting system will increasingly fail to keep up 
with the evolution of the surrounding world. Even if the code for all the parts 
I need to drive exist, that's not the same as having a running system.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] [GSOC] plan9 which arch code to use?

[Anthony Sorace]

sl said:

 The original post (in its way) was asking for advice about
 an amd64 kernel that is not publicly available.

No, it wasn't. There was some confusion over the point that
Plan 9, unlike some other systems, selects the arch based
entirely on the running kernel (no 386 binaries running on
amd64 machines).

 Some people (not knowing the full situation) offered advice
 about publicly available amd64 kernels and were shot down.

Again, that's not what happened. Erik and cinap pointed out
one can use 9atom or 9front; Charles gave instructions for
building the amd64 userland. He then, later, pointed out that
there are things other than just the 64-bit kernels in 9atom
and 9front. It's at that point some folks seem to have felt
compelled to dredge up the old mess of the original amd64
kernel, which was not what Charles was talking about and was
not otherwise at issue here.

I'm not sure who in this conversation you think is not knowing
the full situation; I'm fairly confident that all the salient points
on this topic have been discussed on 9fans ad nauseam.

 Everything else follows from that.

From two faulty premises. Got it.

You should re-read the thread. You may think you've been
responding to what people are actually saying, but the
bunker-mentality defensiveness you repeatedly exhibit has
caused you to misinterpret much.

As for how the situation could be improved: well, there's lots of
potential answers to that question. This has nothing to do with
hiring professional project managers or whatever you seem to
think is required for actual coordination, but taking some care
for your upstream sources is a really effective first step common
among open source projects. Try starting there.

Anthony


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Re: [9fans] [GSOC] fast kernel compile

[Anthony Sorace]

 that, and they gave up on being compatable with apple's webkit.

It's not just about compatibility: they shrunk the scope of the
problem they're trying to solve by quite a bit. WebKit aims to be a
sort of general-purpose web rendering engine; Blink (Google's
fork) is much more closely targeting Chrome  friends.



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[9fans] GSoC 2014 update

[Anthony Sorace]

Folks:
A quick update for everyone on what's going on with GSoC. A week ago 
today, our final selections were announced. This year, we've got five students 
working on the following projects:

Pedro L Coutin-Portuondo will be working on audio for
the Raspberry Pi, over its multiple interfaces. Steve Stallion
will be mentoring, with Dave Eckhardt as backup.

Yan Cui will be implementing, integrating, and testing
alternative locking mechanisms. Charles Forsyth will be
mentoring, with Dave Eckhardt as backup.

Alexandre Esteves will be doing further work on the
browser-based Dis interpreter written in Dart. Charles
Forsyth will be mentoring; I'll be backup.

David Hoskin will me doing further work on the HTML 5
devdraw implementation and related bits. Erik Quanstrom
will be mentoring; I'll be backup.

Jessica Yu will be writing a multi-queue scheduler for
multiprocessor Plan 9 systems. Erik Quanstrom will be
mentoring, with Steve Stallion as backup.

Congratulations to all the students who're participating. We're now in 
the community bonding period, so get comfortable and acquainted. Thanks, 
also, to all the students who applied; we had more interesting proposals than 
slots to fill, and overall I think this round of proposals had the highest 
average quality of any year's GSoC I've seen. Even if we couldn't find a spot 
for you in GSoC, we do hope you'll stick around.

Further updates will mostly happen only on the plan9-gsoc Google group, 
but we'll make sure everyone checks in here a few times during the summer. If 
you want to follow along more closely, feel free to join that group.

Your friendly neighborhood GSoC org admin,
Anthony



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Re: [9fans] (no subject)

[Anthony Sorace]

I'd love to hear about positive results here. Cards with VESA entries for 
non-4:3 modes are rare; I'm not sure I've ever seen one. The Pi, by contrast, 
drives my 16:10 high-res monitor without issues, which is the main reason it's 
my main Plan 9 terminal these days.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] (no subject)

[Anthony Sorace]

 In my experience a VESA BIOS will sometimes report
 different available modes depending on the detected
 EDID.

I have no problem believing this is true, but I'm also sure there's more to it 
than that. The device I'm most frustrated with is a Thinkpad, reporting on the 
built-in display, for example. I've seen the same on at least one other laptop 
with a widescreen display (some HP thing), and at least a pair of desktop 
graphics cards with a 16:10 monitor attached. Very frustrating. I'd be 
interested in a survey with broader results than just dueling anecdotes; I'd be 
happy to know I'd just gotten unlucky.
Anthony



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Re: [9fans] Mounting 9p on an OSX host?

[Anthony Sorace]

I have had very good results with mac9p. I mostly use it
with p9p's srv to get authenticated connections. I've gotten
very few instances of unexpected behavior (dropped
connections I couldn't reliably attribute to network issues),
but nothing that impacted other parts of the Mac.
Anthony



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[9fans] GSoC: student applications are in

[Anthony Sorace]

Folks:
The student application period has now closed. We got
12 applications total, exactly double what we got last year.
More importantly, we've got some really high quality ones in
different areas of the system. Given GSoC's primary goal of
creating new contributors, I'm particularly happy to see two
applications from students from last year.

The mentors have a bunch of work to do over the next
few weeks reviewing proposals, talking with students,
matching potential mentors to potential projects, and so on.
Mentors: instructions will be coming on our mentors' list. If
anyone else wants to follow along, get on the plan9-gsoc
list. The next major milestone to report on to the rest of the
community is the project acceptance announcement, which
happens on April 21.

Anthony



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Re: [9fans] GSoC proposal: Alternative window system

[Anthony Sorace]

 we don't drive any touch hardware, so in the interest of
 success, i would not be interested in a gsoc project that
 required as step 0: identify, purchase and write driver for
 enabling hardware.

If someone were interested in doing this in the short term,
the best option is likely tying it to reviving the iOS drawterm
port. One could also do some interesting UI experiments
with drawterm from laptops with multitouch devices; that
would be less ambitious, but you'd get past step 0 quicker.

Anthony



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