What I Saw at the Evolution of Plan 9 (Geoff Collyer) [pdf]
adi.onlPDF was extracted from an archive on http://www.collyer.net/who/geoff/9/, that's why it's hosted on my web site.
Interesting that there's no discussion of 9front, probably some of the most fanatical lovers of plan9.
It is worth buying their copy of the programmer's manual for how good it is.
Nice reading. But...
> And of course, we must defeat git.
What's wrong with this guy and Git ?
From an email with the author:
"On Unix, I used RCS fairly happily. It was too verbose, but I fixed that. RCS, like most version control systems, also believed that the RCS archive or repository was authoritative and I don't accept that, I think that the checked-out source is authoritative. If you are grepping source, you really don't want to grep the archive files, and you shouldn't have to check out source just to compile. I view the archive as just history. So I added options to do things my way.
For my purposes, the Plan 9 dump, cp, diff and idiff work well. I don't miss a formal version control system.
Git is a horrific botch of a version control system: wasteful, slow, stupid, and unpredictable. When I check in source file(s), I want a snapshot taken always, and I don't want to be told, no, you can't do that, you have to rebase. The fundamental problem is that companies want to believe that multiple programmers can edit the same program at the same time. That's a great way to introduce bugs and break things. When editing a program, you want to have a stable view of it, so you know what you can rely on, you don't want it to be shifting underfoot. The idea that you can apply an arbitrary set of diffs, or subset, to some version of that program, and get a meaningful and correct program out is absurdly optimistic; I wouldn't trust it."