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From: erik quanstrom <quanstro <at> quanstro.net>
Subject: Re: Using the Acme Editor
Newsgroups: gmane.os.plan9.general
Date: 2008-08-21 10:36:58 GMT (1 year, 1 week, 6 days, 20 hours and 3 minutes ago)
> So essentially there shouldn't be a problem with mounting on a single 
> "public" namespace 

namespaces are not public in the sense that they are visible to all
processes.

> as long as there is one user on the system. 

since this started out as a discussion of terminals, i should point out
that terminals by definition have a single user at a time.

> This is classic. Complication is a sign of maturation. Plan 9 has evaded 
> that by not maturing, by avoiding diversification. Before you get angry I 
> must say that's my "personal" opinion. Nothing I'm going to "force" unto 
> you. Nothing I _can_ force unto you.

equally one could say complication is a sign that one's vision was lacking;
a sign that one's system lacks generality.

if you call the opposite of complication immaturity, i'll be proud
to have an operating system that suffers from it.

> How does that differ from presenting of a network interface by a block 
> device on UNIX? And why should avoiding system calls be considered an 
> advantage? Your VFS layer could do anything expected from /net provided 
> that file system abstraction for the resources represented under /net is 
> viable in the first place.

i'm not sure what passes for unix these days, but linux at least
does not present network interfaces as block devices.  there is no
/dev/eth0.

> The VFS approach is by no means inferior to Plan 9's everything-is-a-file, 

what do you mean by this?  the VFS is a kernel interface along the general
lines of plan 9's devtab.  everything-is-a-file[server] is a general principle.

> but on UNIX systems it is limited to resources that can be meaningfully 
> represented as file systems. 

so why is the network hidden in side channels in adjunct namespaces?

- erik