Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2000 01:24:12 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> To: Soren Schmidt <sos@freebsd.dk> Cc: freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Warner Losh <imp@village.org> Subject: Re: gensetdefs using sh(1),sed(1),grep(1) and awk(1) Message-ID: <20001220012411.N19572@fw.wintelcom.net> In-Reply-To: <200012200915.KAA40784@freebsd.dk>; from sos@freebsd.dk on Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 10:15:46AM %2B0100 References: <20001220003833.K19572@fw.wintelcom.net> <200012200915.KAA40784@freebsd.dk>
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* Soren Schmidt <sos@freebsd.dk> [001220 01:11] wrote: > It seems Alfred Perlstein wrote: > > * David O'Brien <obrien@FreeBSD.ORG> [001220 00:35] wrote: > > > On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 01:29:07AM -0700, Warner Losh wrote: > > > > I don't see what the big deal is in requiring perl is anyway. > > > > > > Because the festing pile of sh*t doesn't build properly too often. > > > How many reports have you seen of people who have a lot of trouble with > > > perl when upgrading? We should make it so one can turn Perl off in the > > > world build, and still be able to build a kernel. > > > > > > Once running on a new kernel and new mostly-complete userland, they can > > > re-try bulding the world with perl. > > > > This is a bogus argument, people may have problems _compiling_ perl, > > but I've never heard of anyone having problems with the installed > > perl. > > Ooohhh, do I have news for you then :) > At work we have nothing but trouble between various versions (or is > that subversions) of perl, its evil evil _evil_ EVIL.. That's probably because you're not using it properly. > > > > What makes it different than awk or sh or sed? > > > > > > They always build. > > > > And perl 'always' works. > > No it does not, I stand with David here, get that perl crap out of the > kernel build, its hard to maintain (impossible if you didn't write it yourself > not too long ago) and we shouldn't need perl to build the kernel, period. That's untrue, when commented and using 'strict', perl code is not hard to maintain. The only reason you have an issue with perl is that most of the initial perl stuff in the kernel section was written by Peter who didn't use strict and was pretty stingy with comments. > > What's your point? > > Whats yours ? My point is that writing sh scripts which consist of mostle awk and some pipeline resembling line noise is a stupid way to slow down, obfuscate and limit the future utility of a script that could be faster and cleaner when written in perl. The fact that it's so trivial to write it in sh+sed+grep+awk+sort means that if there's ever some perl catastrophy we can easily drop in a replacement. We don't need that replacement now, we need something fast, less resource hungry and adaptable, which is why a perl script works and using sh+grep+awk+sed doesn't. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk." To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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