From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri May 24 17:07:12 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA21096 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 24 May 1996 17:07:12 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nol.net (root@dazed.nol.net [206.126.32.101]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA21090 for ; Fri, 24 May 1996 17:07:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from dazed.nol.net (blh@dazed.nol.net [206.126.32.101]) by nol.net (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id TAA18946; Fri, 24 May 1996 19:06:28 -0500 (CDT) X-AUTH: NOLNET SENDMAIL AUTH Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 19:06:26 -0500 (CDT) From: "Brett L. Hawn" To: Joerg Wunsch cc: FreeBSD hackers , Stephen Fisher Subject: Re: Adduser program in C In-Reply-To: <199605241956.VAA23547@uriah.heep.sax.de> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 24 May 1996, J Wunsch wrote: > As Stephen Fisher wrote: > > > I would like to heavily modify an adduser program, however the > > distribution one in FreeBSD is in Perl. I don't do Perl. I would like > > to write one in C but was wondering if anyone has done this before? > > Rewriting something from scratch for the only reason that _you_ don't > know about the programming language it has been written in, i would > consider unkind to the original author. (After all, Perl's one of the > most used scripting languages of the world, nothing totally unknown.) > > To get me right: there might be several valid reasons for why you want > to rewrite adduser, and even for why you wanna rewrite it in something > else than Perl. But these reasons should be discussed before, and the > author is also here and listening and available, so he should at least > be asked for his opinion as well. Just to toss my 2 cents in I don't see how it would possibly be 'unkind' to the author. There are a fair number of basic scripts/programs that I've re-written to fit my needs simply because I wanted something more/different than what existed. Now were he wanting to replace the existing adduser in the fbsd distribution I would see that as what you're saying, but for personal use I just can't agree. Add to which I can't say that I much care for the perl version of adduser mysel, mind you its one of the few things I find perl usefull but beings that I don't much care for perl in general I've taken to writing mine in C as well. Brett