Plan 9 Lecture Series: Introduction

[@o1-preview]

woah, the entire community is here, all 20 of us

[@IUT-e8x]

This video heals me

[@notannpc4780]

this is a very good video and has sparked my interest. looking forward to more. thank you.

[@Schneiburs]

This is great stuff, a nice complement to adventuresin9. I’ll hold off on requests until I see more episodes, but please keep them coming

[@Koolaidchugger]

Is plan9 safe to run if one person can understand the code? Im fascinated with the concept. Was about to try Void and someone sent me here.

[@dergrauemann]

Thanks for this Video. Liked it and it is a good overview. Liked especially "Alien World of possibilities" :D Looking forward for the next Videos to view them unter 9front.

[@henrygonzales9666]

How are processes and memory managed in plan 9?

[@ivansukin721]

Great video, thank you! Plan 9 is very neat.

[@csebastian3]

Do you think Go and its continuous commitment to Plan9 has revitalized the Plan9 ecosystem?

[@thefrontfelloff]

I think Go has helped people discover Plan 9 but I don't believe having go available on Plan 9 has changed the ecosystem much. I also wouldn't quite call it a continuous commitment really, I would say the Plan 9 support in Go is more on life support, with a lot of testing there being mostly an after thought. Things break subtly and sometimes will stay like that for multiple versions of go. A couple years ago they even had a proposal to remove Plan 9 support altogether. I am very thankful to the folks that do fix the bugs as they are discovered, but the code in general still needs exercised a lot more.

[@antoniofinl]

There is / was a package instalation named "contrib" with a gui and others tools "contrib/gui" The author was one of the developers of Abaco browser if I remembered right.

[@superangrybrit]

Talk about daemons/fileservers/services. When someone sets up a FTP/HTTP server: Who is the owner of that namespace? How does it differ from an OS of older design (unix/windows)? ty

[@thefrontfelloff]

This will be covered soon. I likely want to lay the ground work for what a namespace is first, discussing the none user is its own can of worms that is properly best discussed within the context of 9p authentication.

[@alurma]

Nice! Curious if there's a general package management solution for Plan 9. Something like pkgsrc/guix/nix (not sure if the latter two make sense in a statically linked world). Basically a directed graph dependency solver or something like that (which a package manager is)? I expect them to be unpopular on Plan 9?

[@alurma]

I imagine if one can build a recent Go then one probably can piggy back on a Go package manager for some tasks (limited to one language, but still), but I don't know if 9front people use Go that way

[@thefrontfelloff]

The software ecosystem is not generally large enough right now to warrant this type of solution. For even the most involved of external software (netsurf and treason) at worst you have some script that builds a handful of projects. Part of this is as you mention the static compilation nature of Plan 9, but the other is just that for the most part we write a lot of our own software and the base system has quite a lot. 9front generally about as "batteries included" as openBSD is, if not a bit more. I would say that we're right on the cusp of needing something a bit more sophisticated. There was an attempt at some point in time to have a ports tree (akin to pkgssrc in netbsd or ports tree in freebsd) however it has generally bitrotted simply due to the lack of use of its programs, so I would say that serves as some evidence that we're not quite there yet. It's interesting that you mention Nix, because there is an aspect to that more then just the package management itself. That being the nixos modules that allow nix to define an entire linux "deployment" with just nix. If you are careful you can use something like /cfg/$sysname , but it's not quite all in one as nix is. I've been interested in exploring what it would look like to do something more with this for 9front.

[@alurma]

By the way, is there a Plan 9/9front offtopic chans? I know about 9fans, but I suppose I'm asking for an IRC chan or something like that (I don't really use IRC currently)

[@alurma]

@kittyfangz5262 thanks

[@nvelyurov]

Thanks a lot! I'm very new to Plan 9. What's the best way to learn it? Is there a getting started or something? Are there any books about?

[@thefrontfelloff]

The best way to get started with the system is to just try using it and experimenting. Once you feel more comfortable with using the system I would suggest trying to dig in to some of the code for programs. There really isn't a great all-in-one book I would suggest, but many of the papers in /sys/doc go into more of the narrative of the design considerations.