[gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Final Report

Hi, all.

Plan 9 From Gentoo is a GSoC 2011 project to overlay a Plan 9-inspired userspace on top of a Gentoo base system.

So, things ended up looking a little different than I originally planned, but I think that is the case with any significant software project. By and large, I'm happy with the way things turned out and Plan 9 From Gentoo seems mostly true to my original proposal. It contains a little more Gentoo than I originally imagined it would, like Portage, and it also ships a mostly intact GNU userspace alongside the Plan 9 userspace, something I had not anticipated early on when envisioning what Plan 9 From Gentoo would look like.

Originally, in my proposal, I had planned to split plan9port into discrete components. However, when I delved deeper and queried the Plan 9 community if that was something they would be interested in, there didn't seem to be any interest. That, combined with a foreign build system and many inter-dependent parts, led me to abandon that part of my proposal. I think this was the right move, as it allowed me to focus on the actual Plan 9 From Gentoo liveCD image.

I did end up adding support for a couple things that I hadn't anticipated supporting when I wrote the original proposal, such as Firefox and the Go language environment. I also didn't anticipate any of my work on 'nine', which began when Greg k-h suggested that Glendix's functionality could be accomplished in userspace. 'nine' is still a work-in-progress, but I will continue tinkering with it during my free time now that GSoC is over.

After I finish this email, I'll fire off one to gentoo-dev announcing Plan 9 From Gentoo and then, other than submitting code samples to Google, Summer of Code will, for me, have ended.

Project page: http://soc.dev.gentoo.org/~rps/plan9/
LiveCD image: http://soc.dev.gentoo.org/~rps/plan9-download/plan9-from-gentoo-x86-minimal.iso

Anyways, I think that about sums things up,
rps