Using plumbing

-as of Sat Feb 23 02:11:52 EST 2013-

Plumbing is a mechanism for passing messages between applications. It has a customizable set of rules (see plumb(6)) to process incoming messages and dispatch them to target applications.

The plumber(4) is the file server that performs the message processing and dispatch.

It is up to each application how it wishes to use this mechanism, but in the user-interface domain, the mechanism often allows the user to point to a file-name or URL and have the associated resource processed by an appropriate application.

EXAMPLES

In the rc shell window you can select or position the text cursor inside a piece of text and press button 2 and select "plumb" from the pop-up menu. Depending on what the text is, the plumber will perform different actions. For example:

a .ps, .pdf, or .dvi file name invokes the page(1) display program
a .gif, .jpg, .png, .ppm file name also invokes page(1) to display them
a compiler error message indicating a file and line number will invoke the default text editor to open the file at the given line number
a .h file name will search /sys/include for the given header and opens it in the default text editor
a man(1) page reference invokes man(1) for the appropriate page
a URL opens the default browser for that page

The plumber can provide easy shortcuts for common functions. For example, given a script 'web' which takes an argument of a URL to open in a web browser, the plumbing rule:

	# RFC's from one of the nicer-looking repositories.
	type is text
	data matches 'RFC:([0-9]+)'
	plumb to web
	plumb start web http://rfc.sunsite.dk/rfc/rfc$1.html

will make RFC:2325 a link to some of the IETF's better work. A number of other potentially useful plumbing examples have been collected.

A NICE TRICK

Namespaces in Plan 9 are local. That is, if you're inside an application that has forked the namespace, you can't change the namespace visible to other applications. In particular, you can't mount a remote file server and then plumb it to another running application. Here's a neat trick that lets you do that.

	srvfs plumbspace /n
	plumber
	rfork n
	mount -b /srv/plumbspace /n

Put this in your /lib/profile (before rio is started) and /n is now an indirect part of the namespace that can be changed in all applications by the plumber. An extra rule in the plumber is all that's needed to make use of it:

type is text
data matches 'Local (.*)'
plumb to none
plumb start rc -c $1

For example, say I wished to mount a local kfs disk and edit a file in it. I can open a new shell window, type:

disk/kfs
plumb 'Local mount /srv/kfs /n/kfs'

and the files on the new disk will be visible to all applications on the machine, including, for example, an existing incarnation of Acme.

PLUMBING BETWEEN MACHINES ON A GRID

The plumber is a good example of the power of network transparency in Plan 9. On a well-connected grid, the plumber will naturally act to dispatch messages to applications running on the correct machine. Consider a small grid of 3 machines: terminal, file/cpu/auth, and tcp boot cpu. The user's primary work environment is via cpu(1) to the file/cpu/auth server. A web browser runs on the terminal, and an acme(1) editing and compiling environment runs in a separate cpu(1) session to the tcp boot cpu server.

As the user works within the primary cpu workspace, plumbed messages will find the correct destination automatically. Messages of url form will be received by the browser running on the local terminal and links will open there, messages referencing source code files will be received by the editor and appear for editing and compilation on the tcp boot cpu, and messages for applications running on the main cpu will be processed there.

The necessary condition for this correct message dispatch between nodes is simply that all applications running on the grid have a connection to the plumber within their namespace, and have a view of file namespace which allows them to access any necessary resources. Programs which the user is interacting with directly should automatically have the plumber available at /mnt/plumb or /mnt/term/mnt/plumb; other programs will need to mount the user's plumber from /srv, possibly after an import(4) of the /srv of the machine hosting the plumber.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

Plumbing and Other Utilities - A paper on the design and implementation of the plumbing system.