Subj : Re: linux permissions issue
To   : scarface
From : tenser
Date : Wed Sep 03 2025 01:58:32

On 02 Sep 2025 at 08:42a, scarface pondered and said...
 
 sc> It's really sad that plan 9 never really took off. If someone were to
 sc> start again, what feature(s) from plan 9 do you think would be essential
 sc> to copy?

Yeah.  It was inevitable, but still a shame: Unix was too entrenched
with too big of a userbase by the time Plan 9 came on the scene, and
AT&T was determined not to "lose control" of it the way they did with
Unix, so they really messed up the licensing terms early on.  Had they
released 1e with something like the BSD license back in 1992, the
world may well have been very different.  Oh well.

The question of what features one would preserve in a new system is
surprisingly difficult to answer.  Plan 9 was, fundamentally, a research
system, and research systems are designed and built to address specific
questions that are of interest in the time and place where the research
is done.  For Plan 9, what they were trying to do (in a nutshell) was see
if they could adopt the Unix ideas to a world where distributed networks
of computers were the norm, and everyone now had a high-resolution bitmapped
graphics display, not an 80x24 serial terminal.  Whereas the Unix world
was evolving so that networks consisted of lots of little city-state
timesharing systems with bolt-ons like X11 for interaction ("a network
of Unixes", if you will) plan 9 was about building a unified "Unix" from
the network.  But that time has passed and that place no longer exists,
so it's unclear what lessons are still applicable.

Regardless, if I were to build a new system from scratch tomorrow, some
of the things I might try to take away are:

1. A single unified network protocol for access resources in a
   file-like manner,
2. Per-process(group) mutable namespaces for resources,
3. The security model.

That's probably it.  The implementation itself isn't worth preserving.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

.