thm 2005-09-24 Summary
Original
agenda:
- New website/wiki - uriel
- 9con.madrid - uriel/gorka?/annavaro?/nemo?
- Plan B status. Services, utilities, and ideas. - nemo
- Plans for our Plan B for Plan 9 (sorry, couldn't resist) - nemo
NEW WEBSITE / WIKI -- URIEL
- Uriel said, that the new design for the main Plan 9 website was started after the last THM.
- The link for the design he showed is: http://glendy.se.cat-v.org/who/uriel/p9site/
- One of the main ideas behind it is, that most of the links direct to the wiki, so people can change its content.
- What needs to be done is to fix the wiki, so its style looks more like the frontpage.
- Uriel would like to get more papers into the "papers" page.
- Uriel asked, if the website should indicate, that there were changes in the "Fourth Edition" of Plan 9, since its release.
- Nemo said, that it is still the "Fourth Edition" and the status could be indicated in the form "vX/X/X".
- Uriel said that sources was unreliable lately and so more mirrors of sources are needed.
- Nemo offered a fileserver, web and 9fs access.
- Uriel told, that one idea behind the new website is to have everything in sources, so it can be mirrored.
- Uriel asked for help with the "News" wiki page, so events, like the Plan B release are written down there.
- News items are everything and if someone thinks, that it is not news, that he/she can edit the wiki page.
INFERNO WIKI AND CHAOS (NOT PLANNED)
- Uriel asked forsyth about the plan, to have a business oriented and hacker style website, on the Inferno mailinglist.
- Forsyth said, that the wiki, for which Caerwyn volunteered, should be the hacker style website.
- Uriel asked, if Inferno and Plan 9 things could be kept centralized.
- Forsyth said, that he does not disagree.
- Nemo asked for a central service register.
- Gdiaz said, that the 9grid nodes could be used for that role.
- In the further discussion about the divergence of Plan 9 and Inferno drivers was a new model, like /sys/src/pc-drivers
- chaos
9CON.MADRID -- URIEL
- Uriel hopes to show up.
- Nemo said, that they want to poll the university to get support.
- Two options were given: december or may
- Uriel said, that many of the people are at CCC and so december would be overkill.
PLAN B -- NEMO
21:01 <Nemo> Well, we just wanted two things: 21:01 <Nemo> - avoid static mounts and let the system adapt to FS availability 21:02 <Nemo> - follow the "everything is a file" idea to the limit. 21:02 <Nemo> For example, I was disappointed because in rio I couldnt 21:02 <Nemo> use files to operate on widgets and the like. 21:02 <Nemo> In the same way, I couldn't copy an mp3 file to somewhere to make it play. 21:03 <Nemo> The same happen to other services. But most notably, the UI. 21:03 <Nemo> What we do is to announce resources to the network, and then mount them using our 21:04 <Nemo> volume stuff (dynamic mounts, really). 21:04 <Nemo> For example, mount -U /what /what 21:04 <Nemo> is what we use to get in /what 21:04 <Nemo> the union of all file trees for information about things. 21:04 <Nemo> A result is that you can ls /what to see what machines are around. 21:05 <Nemo> The same for other resources. For example, we use du to locate 21:05 <Nemo> things like button:Pause (pause buttons) in UIs found 21:05 <Nemo> at /devs/*ui/ or any other place. 21:05 <Nemo> Then we can 'echo press' >/devs/....../button:Pause/ctl 21:06 <Nemo> to press the button. I think this gives the idea. 21:06 <Nemo> There are two things that are really useful: being able to import 21:07 <Nemo> resources without having to mount them by hand, and 2, having a 21:07 <Nemo> very detailed interface for services (having a file for the button).
- Nemo said, that he wants to include these ideas into Plan 9.
- He said, that he finished volfs for Plan 9:
21:12 <Nemo> The daemon sends/listens for announces, 21:13 <Nemo> file servers register with /srv/vols to let volfs know that there's anew service. 21:13 <Nemo> (if you want to, of course) 21:13 <Nemo> So, your volfs knows of several FSs 21:13 <Nemo> that have a given name, and a set of constraints. 21:13 <Nemo> For example, /usr/nemo!Unemo!Lhome!Cok 21:14 <Nemo> which means, this thing is a file tree for "/usr/nemo" 21:14 <Nemo> that is owned by nemo, located at home (whatever that might mean), and the 21:14 <Nemo> latency of the connection from your machine to the FS seems to be good enough 21:14 <Nemo> to page-in binaries. 21:15 <Nemo> Well, the point is that volfs has the list of known volumes. 21:15 <Nemo> Then, you mount volumes from it: 21:15 <Nemo> mount /srv/vols /usr/nemo /usr/nemo!Cok 21:15 <Nemo> which means, you mount at /usr/nemo 21:15 <Nemo> the spec "/usr/nemo/!Cok". 21:16 <Nemo> The daemon takes care of supplying a file tree that matches your request.
- Gdiaz asked, if it does hot swap.
- Nemo answered, that it does something like this, as you request a "resource" and not hold just the fid.
- Nemo showed examples on the usage of volfs. (See the logs.)
AFTERSHOW
- Uriel asked about kencc.
- Forsyth said, that he is working on the tarball.