On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 7:47 PM, erik quanstrom quanstro.net> wrote:

Hm, but what's the alternative here? Readahead seems somewhat
attractive, if difficult (I worry about blocking reads and timing
sensitive file systems). But there's one problem I can't resolve - how
do you know what offset to Tread without consulting the previous
Rread's count?
Actually, I understand there has been discussion about grouping tags
to allow for things like Twalk/Topen batching without waiting for
Rwalk (which sounds like a great idea), maybe that would work here
also...
-sqweek

* sqweek gmail.com> [080918 12:02]:

Actually, this whole subject was thoroughly discussed at the *first*
iwp9; but apparently nobody is bothered by this enough to implement
any of the then suggested solutions.

Op is not one the solutions discussed at the time, and saying 'just
use another protocol' is not a way to resolve the shortcomings 9P
clearly has.

Moreover most of the solutions discussed back then seemed quite clear
and would be (mostly) backwards compatible, so I still don't
understand why Op was created rather than implement one of those
solutions, although my understanding is that nemo and co. considered
it easier (ie., didn't involve changing other people's code?).

Also worth noting is that Op has some serious shortcomings, if I
recall correctly it fails to translate some important 9P semantics
like walks, which means that while Op can transparently proxy 9P
connections, certain file servers wont work properly (I might be
mistaken, and certainly don't remember the details).

This is not to say that there is no use for a protocol like Op (it
shares much in common with http, which clearly has found lots of use
in the 'real world').