Date: Sun, 17 Aug 1997 23:03:59 +0200 From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: What's the interest in standard tools rewritten in perl? Message-ID: <19970817230359.JX15769@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=3C199708172040=2EWAA00331=40sos=2Efreebsd=2Edk=3E=3B_fro?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?m_S=F8ren_Schmidt_on_Aug_17=2C_1997_22=3A40=3A10_%2B0200?= References: <19970817141632.FT54182@uriah.heep.sax.de> <199708172040.WAA00331@sos.freebsd.dk>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
As Søren Schmidt wrote: > I wouldn't bet on that 80% factor, if somebody is going to rewrite the > base utils. For one this is a total waste of time (and maybe talent), > the other is that it will render us completely incompatible with the > rest of the BSD world. I think that nobody would be stupid enough to > willingly takeover that kind of maintenance burden... We've been there before, so this will be my last followup in this thread. (Please, don't redirect any future personal Cc's to me either, i'm getting sick of Cc's for lengthy threads i'm not interested in.) Go and read Net/2's whereis(1) code, and then decide which one is easier maintenable. (Sorry, the Net/2 code is `tainted', so you need a FreeBSD 1.x CD-ROM for it. This was another reason to use Perl for me, the structure is now so clearly different that nobody could claim a copyright violation, even though the user interface is basically the same. Don't count on the 4.4BSD-Lite version at all, it's totally crippled, compared to the historic one. I wouldn't have rewritten it at all otherwise.) Scripting languages are mainly used to _reduce_ the maintenance effort. Wonder why phk prefers Tcl for so many things? ;) > If I want useless bloat That's why i told about a required *justification* before somebody's going to rewrite something. Just a rewrite only, with (nearly) the same features, the same bad structure, etc. constitutes IMHO not a justification. Neither of my quoted examples falls into this. The question whether some particular developer perhaps doesn't `speak' some of the used languages himself might bias him, but this alone doesn't establish ``unmaintenable code''. I bet even CVSup is probably way easier to maintain for me now than it would have been written in C++, or (*shudder* :) in C. And i've got absolutely no experience in M3 right now. But i've got no doubts i could learn it if necessary... -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19970817230359.JX15769>