From owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG  Mon Jan 31 01:19:22 2005
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To: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:49:41 +0100."
             <m3651faux6.fsf@merlin.emma.line.org> 
Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 17:19:20 -0800
From: "Kevin Oberman" <oberman@es.net>
Message-Id: <20050131011920.E78F65D07@ptavv.es.net>
cc: Holger Kipp <hk@alogis.com>
cc: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>
cc: perl@freebsd.org
cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: [HEADS UP] perl symlinks in /usr/bin will be gone 
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> From: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>
> Date: Sun, 30 Jan 2005 14:49:41 +0100
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
> 
> Holger Kipp <hk@alogis.com> writes:
> 
> > It violates POLA on 5-STABLE, and it will violate POLA on 6-CURRENT,
> > especially as most perl programmers assume /usr/bin/perl to be the
> > correct path. 
> 
> POLA doesn't apply to -CURRENT.

POLA always applies, but major releases are considered a good opportunity
to make needed changes that would generate excessive astonishment on a
minor update. This is at least too big for a minor update POLA violation
and may well be too big for even a major version.

FreeBSD does NOT exist to justify hier(7), style(9) or anything of the
sort. These are tools to provide consistent behavior and make FreeBSD
maintainable and understandable to developers and users, not to say
"screw the users".

Perl has been in /usr/bin on almost every Unix-like OS around for longer
than FreeBSD has existed. I think changing something like this would be
REALLY astonishing to way too many users and developers who happen to
write Perl and expect to find it where the Perl documentation say to.

-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634