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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!news.cac.psu.edu!news.pop.psu.edu!psuvax1!psuvax1.cse.psu.edu!schwartz From: schwartz@roke.cse.psu.edu (Scott Schwartz) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: One more BSD?? just say no. (was Re: Where do we go from here?) Date: 26 Apr 1994 23:21:49 GMT Organization: Penn State Comp Sci & Eng Lines: 34 Message-ID: <SCHWARTZ.94Apr26192149@roke.cse.psu.edu> References: <MYCROFT.94Apr25162542@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> <1994Apr26.060607.17149@wx.gtegsc.com> <CovnqF.AyK@biles.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: roke.cse.psu.edu In-reply-to: daniels@biles.com's message of Tue, 26 Apr 1994 17:39:50 GMT daniels@biles.com (Brad Daniels) writes: I have read a few articles on Plan 9, and I attended Ritchie's talk at Uniforum, and Plan 9 really doesn't look that exciting except for its signature feature, the ability to have multiple views of file systems. I suggest that you ftp and read the manpages and other documents. I find it exciting to see a system that is whole bunches cleaner than posix, aside from doing more. I'm not sure what "signature feature" you are referring to, but the idea of per-process namespaces is different than "multiple views of file systems". I may not be being fair, since I'm sure Plan 9 has substantially more power than early Unixes, but I see no reason to believe that it will grow any less than Unix kernels did as functionality gets added. That's a matter of engineering and discipline, and is true of any system. Many modern unix's seem to be constructed by taking the union of all past mistakes---Solaris has ptys and streams and select and poll and asynchio and fork and vfork and threads and mmap and shm and both kinds of signals and sockets and tli and compatability with bsd and sysv and posix and vms and the powerset of the bugs of all of those things. You have to be willing to throw out the dusty deck and start afresh once in a while. Consider one example of the consequences: most unix installations do no network authentication. BSD ships with kerberos, but as an optional add on. The result is that it is poorly integrated and seldom used. In fact, getting people to even consider it is like pulling teeth. Plan 9 has network authentication built in, so that you cannot avoid using it. That's the Right Thing.