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Date: Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:23:50 +0200
From: Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org>
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To: "Dan Mahoney, System Admin" <danm@prime.gushi.org>
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Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Circumstance leading up to removal of perl from base?
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Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I know it was a long time ago, but I was talking with a co-worker about 
> why perl was removed from the base in v5 -- I seem to recall a 
> discussion on some mailing list about either the number of arguments or 
> the format of the arguments and/or output of a base perl function having 
> changed between 5.005 and 5.6.1.
> 
> Thing is, that's a very vague thing to try to google for, and I can't 
> seem to find it.  Are there any old-timers who remember the system call 
> in question?

I dont think it was that.  AFAICR the issue was mostly that it was a 
*lot* of work to mangle the perl build into bmake format so it would 
build with make world, and it was also difficult to avoid conflicts with 
other versions of perl that needed to be installed for port builds.  It 
was just too difficult to maintain in the base system, especially when 
nothing used it.

Kris