From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Nov 21 12:41:10 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA15747 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:41:10 -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 MAA15742 for ; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 12:41:07 -0800 (PST) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id NAA13799; Thu, 21 Nov 1996 13:20:48 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199611212020.NAA13799@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Who needs Perl? We do! To: p.richards@elsevier.co.uk (Paul Richards) Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 13:20:48 -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: <57sp638rpb.fsf@tees.elsevier.co.uk> from "Paul Richards" at Nov 21, 96 02:10:08 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 > So, for me perl is needed and sed/awk (and even sh) could go > away. Perl does it all much better. (Implicitly invoke your own smiley > before getting wound up about this, though I am essentially serious, I > never use any of the above any more and it's been quite a few years > since I worked on a system that didn't have perl). Actually, you use sh to run /etc/rc* each time you boot. It is a minimal system component, mostly because the data and the procedure for system startup have not been sufficiently abstracted. If they had, you could replace the startup procedure with a binary and throw /bin/sh away. This is assuming you replace system components in /etc, /bin, and so on with non-shell-script versions. I have been arguing loudly for each change I see which moves the system in the direction of seperating procedure from the data on which it acts, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. > I've always felt that we should have a modular install mechanism like > Sun used to have in 4.1.3 (not sure about Solaris, never installed it > personally). Each module was self contained, there was a base system > and then you added things like the man module, which included all the > man binaries and the pages. We could have perl module, which included > perl and all the perl scripts. As long as the scripts are something > can be left out (which currently they could be) then that'd work. If > you could live without the adduser script etc then you wouldn't need > to install that module. Or SCO Xenix, the end-all, be-all of install dependency graph reduction. ... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.