20 Jul 2002 (updated 20 Jul 2002 at 04:47 UTC)
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GNOME Summit: Whoohoo, god did not strike me down today! I actually made it, though I did get lost in the tangle of corridors between building 77 and building 33. Apparently I was supposed to go through doors marked "DO NOT OPEN! THIS IS A FIRE EXIT AND ALARMS WILL GO OFF" :-)
Luckily I met up with ettore, lewing and Anna Dirks and we went out for lunch/sight seeing before heading back around 2pm for more talks.
Plan9's 'plumber': Niiiice. For those that didn't attend the Plan9 talk, Rob Pike talked about his plumber library which originally started out as the Acme shell-type thing. You can check out some documenation at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/plumb.html. Someone else explained it in their diary entry, but from their description, it doesn't sound all that great - sounds like just a hyperlink. You really need to read the docs to get a feel for the awesomeness of it.
Afterwards I went up to the hacking lounge and was assaulted with questions/pokes/prods/etc by a number of people. I might even use the word "pelted". Keith Packard wanted more than 5 "Labels" which is a new feature in Evolution. "Why hard code to only 5? What's the point in that?" I dunno! I swear! I just copied Mozilla's interface! I figured if Mozilla felt 5 was good then it was good enough for me (not to mention everyone who begged me for this feature pointed me to Mozilla's implementation). Anyways, shouldn't be too hard to expand this to use a linked list of labels.
A few thoughts on the Plan9 plumber:
First, what to do if there are multiple viewers for something listening on the socket? Which window does the info go to? Obviously this'd be a problem in the Real World that Robe Pike's implementation doesn't seem to solve (although his implementation seems to be more a proof-of-concept rather than the final solution).
On second thought, maybe it doesn't really matter? If plumb only allowed one "connection" per destination socket then the locking problem is solved too.
Secondly, ...I sem to have lost my train of thought.