9ph works!

Finally, since last September, I've gotten around to messing with 9ph again. That's the 9P2000 implementation in Haskell that Tim Newsham basically wrote and sent to me to play around with.

I had started such a project on my own at one point, but Tim totally beat me to it, and rather than just re-implement the wheel, I figured I'd check out what he'd done and checked it in.

Today, I wrote a function that runs an IO program yielding a socket that's connected to a local 9P2000 server (or error'd out actually) running on 127.0.0.1:6872. From there I was able to create messages for Tattach, Topen, and Tread, and could explore the errors and successes of the server I was talking to.

For my experiments I just used the Inferno operating system with

"styxlisten -A 'tcp!*!6872' export /"

This just exports the local / namespace that the process running the styxlisten command can see to the world on TCP protocols listening on port 6872.

This library should be enough to write scripts for what is quickly becoming my favorite X11 window manager (if you must use one) wmii. wmii actually exposes a bit of functionality via a 9P server that you can mount from v9fs, Inferno, or any other 9P client. It'd be nice to be able to write some Haskell to configure wmii I figured, so this might be my first use for this library.

I'm hoping to get back to this again before long. This was good progress. I'm going to check in on Tim and see if he's got any more updates he feels he'd like to push. If not I'll just work from this fork.