Date: Sun, 2 May 1999 22:57:16 +0200 From: Wolfram Schneider <wosch@panke.de.freebsd.org> To: David Lowe <dlowe@pootpoot.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: adduser, rmuser, and perl... Message-ID: <19990502225716.47385@panke.de.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905011230290.668-100000@pootpoot.com>; from David Lowe on Sat, May 01, 1999 at 12:56:50PM -0700 References: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9905011230290.668-100000@pootpoot.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On 1999-05-01 12:56:50 -0700, David Lowe wrote:
> Hacker folks -
>
> I found myself hacking up adduser the other day, and I had some thoughts.
>
> First, since FreeBSD has finally caught ships with perl5, adduser (and
> other perl shipped with FreeBSD) could be rewritten to take advantage of
> the many improvements of perl5 over perl4. Most of this would be cosmetic
> & 'perl-anal' stuff like lexically scoping variables, 'use strict' and
> '/usr/bin/perl -w' (roughly equivalent to gcc -Wall) and using the
> object-oriented IO subsystem. Basically, switching from
> perl-as-scripting-language to perl-as-programming-language.
>
> Second, I thought it would be nice to provide for easy added functionality
> on a per-site basis, without having to edit the main adduser script.
> Something like: 'local-stuff = "/usr/local/bin/adduser-extra"' in
> /etc/adduser.conf, where the script $local-stuff would be called with all
> of the new user's data as arguments.
>
> Those are my thoughts. My questions, then, are: is anyone currently
> working on adduser? I searched the list archives and turned up nothing
> since August '97. Anyone? And would these changes be welcome? I have
No. The development of adduser is dead.
We have now a replacement for adduser - the pw(8) command:
pw - create, remove, modify & display system users and groups
pw is written in C.
If you want rewrite adduser you should
a) write adduser as a front-end to pw(8). Call it directly
or better write a perl Module for pw(8) or libutil(3).
b) write adduser from scratch. The current version
is an ugly perl hack
> some spare cycles right now I could apply to this, but is this a case best
> left untouched - "If it works, don't fix it" or are changes/improvements
> welcome?
> Finally, are there any perl people working on FreeBSD in general? I mean,
> there are a number of perl programs in the core distribution, but they're
> all looking very perl4ish to me. Again, perhaps I could apply some of
> those spare cycles here.
I wrote most of the perl4 scripts in FreeBSD. I simple don't have the
time to rewrite them in perl5. There are many real bugs in the system
which must be fixed first.
Feel free to rewrite the perl scripts and send me the patches ;-)
--
Wolfram Schneider <wosch@freebsd.org> http://wolfram.schneider.org
To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990502225716.47385>