From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Nov 21 12:27:20 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA15097 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:27:20 -0800 (PST) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA15090 for ; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:27:12 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA13774; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 13:09:31 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199611212009.NAA13774@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? We do! To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith) Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 13:09:31 -0700 (MST) Cc: davidn@sdev.usn.blaze.net.au, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, terry@lambert.org, roberto@keltia.freenix.fr, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199611210427.OAA11100@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Nov 21, 96 02:57:16 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > It's not a question of whether _everyone_ needs it, but whether a > sufficient number of people need it. I think that so far the evidence > indicates that this is the case. Not _everyone_ needs an appendectomy. But perhaps a _suficient_ number of people need them, so we should remove everyone's appendix at age 6. > I'm entirely in agreement with the basic principle, but I strongly > believe that we need to incorporate mature and ubiquitous tools in > as seamless and standard a fashion as possible. This is a different argument entirely... it is a complaint that the installation dependency process is insufficiently seamless. Whether it is or not is less important than the fact that if you wish to add layered dependencies (like PERL) for service extension, it is the responsibility of the peple doing the adding to fix the tools so that the added services appear to be standard system components. This is an issue in layered software installation, not an issue of "system services which should be standard". No one is arguing that PERL should not *seem standard* for those packages/ports which depend on it, only that the *seeming* and the *being* should remain seperate. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.