Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 21:56:07 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: jos@catnook.com, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: scripting language in base system? Message-ID: <p05111714b9591c28c88c@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <20020715182957.GA32690@lizzy.catnook.com> References: <200207151718.g6FHIkof007662@dotar.thuvia.org> <20020715182957.GA32690@lizzy.catnook.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
It seems to me that this topic has nothing to do with "the package system". It also seems to me that this topic is a bikeshed of immense proportions, and we shouldn't bury the very useful discussion on package-system issues with this bikeshed. At 11:29 AM -0700 7/15/02, Jos Backus wrote: >On Mon, Jul 15, 2002, Mark Valentine wrote: > > I'd like to hear you name one that would fit the bill, never > > mind find a concensus... > >First we need to decide if we even _want_ a more powerful >scripting language included. It sounds like the current >consensus is a resounding NO. However, applications like >portupgrade are much easier written in a scripting language >than using the standard tools. Scripting languages, for all >their faults, also reach a larger audience of potential >contributors than the standard tools do. For what it's worth, I'd like to see ruby in the standard freebsd system. However, I can easily get into arguments with myself (never mind anyone else) when trying to pin down my reasoning for this. I keep trying to write this message, listing my thoughts on scripting languages. While I can come up with a list of ideas that I completely agree with, the problem is that the items in that list conflict with each other, and thus I can't even come to a firm conclusion that *I* like. And in the process of trying, I'd probably manage to irritate everyone who has any opinion on this matter. I do not agree with the claim that sh+awk+sed is a adequate alternative to perl, ruby, or python. I also do not believe that we'll take the time to write everything in C which we might find useful, and thus useful things do not get written because we refuse to include tools which would allow us to write such things. Portupgrade was written in ruby because it was NOT getting written in any of the alternatives. So, so far, I've irritated the standard unix scripters, and the C-programmers... At the same time, I don't think we can ever "be safe" with some standard scripting language in the base system, because that scripting language will change over time. And my guess is that any good scripting language will eventually evolve into it's own "OS-neutral" platform, and thus grow into a monster that we won't want to have in our base system. Thus, any good, standard, popular, and useful scripting language is probably going to be a bad choice over time. That claim should manage to irritate everyone else... This is an unwinnable debate, imo. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?p05111714b9591c28c88c>