Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 14:41:45 -0800 (PST) From: "Brant M. Katkansky" <bmk@transport.com> To: alk@Think.COM (Tony Kimball) Cc: gclarkii@main.gbdata.com, current@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: perl4 Message-ID: <199603202241.OAA02668@dtr.com> In-Reply-To: <199603201434.IAA19341@compound> from "Tony Kimball" at Mar 20, 96 08:34:00 am
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> I absolutely agree that we need perl (or more accurately that "FreeBSD > needs perl"). I claim that it does not belong in the base OS, because > it is not tightly coupled, and because most perl users will use the > most recent version, and *not* the version shipped, so it is a legacy, > baggage. > Making the base OS small is a Good Thing. Making it independent of > the choice of perl version level is a Good Thing. The point is to > give users the freedom to choose, rather than forcing them to remove > perl by hand in order to eliminate an abhorrent redundancy. Would you > require that XF86 be bundled as well? Mi genoito! I'd have to agree in principle. Perl doesn't belong in the base OS - it's too much of a moving target. However, since Perl *is* part of FreeBSD, and certain aspects of the base OS depend on Perl, we can hardly go back now. I'm not even going to attempt to argue this issue, because it isn't going to happen. I use perl5 for all of the perl scripts that I write, but keep perl4 on the system so that legacy scripts (esp. those shipped with FreeBSD) will still run. The way I see it, we have several options: * Leave things the way they are, and keep perl4 as the standard perl. Perl5 can be installed in /usr/local as a package. * Ship perl5 with the base OS. Not good, it adds bloat to the base release and may break a lot of existing scripts. * Remove perl from the base OS and let this be a local policy matter. Realistically, this isn't going to happen. * Ship perl4 with the base OS, and provide an option in the install to replace perl4 with perl5. Still could have the potential of busting some legacy scripts, but as long as the installer is informed of this, I see no problems with this - as long as replacements for the FreeBSD-supplied scripts are supplied. Could be a real maintenance nightmare. As long as we have tools in the base release that depend on perl4, I would have to go with the first or last option.
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