thm 2005-09-24 Summary (Plan 9 wiki)

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.