Date: Tue, 15 Dec 1998 22:19:07 -0500 (EST) From: Chuck Robey <chuckr@mat.net> To: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> Cc: freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, John Birrell <jb@cimlogic.com.au>, forrie@forrie.com Subject: Re: FreeBSD Buildworld fails Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.05.9812152203520.348-100000@picnic.mat.net> In-Reply-To: <199812160223.SAA01119@dingo.cdrom.com>
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On Tue, 15 Dec 1998, Mike Smith wrote: > > Mike Smith wrote: > > > > > > I think it's the "case of the missing elf shared loader" that only gets > > reported by the kernel, not into user-space. Perl is really difficult > > to bootstrap build. I wish we had a rule that said it is not allowed > > to be used as a build tool. Perhaps I'll go hide now. 8-) > > If we had Tcl in the base system, this would be trivial. I don't want > to use Perl at all - one is simply told that Perl is the be-all and > end-all of hackish scripting languages, but it truly appears to be too > fragile for that. But the reasons for keeping tcl _out_ of the main systems are a heck of a lot larger than those for perl. Unfortunately, the tcl folks seemingly care very little about maintaining backwards compatibility, and many tcl tools require their own specific version of tcl/tk to run. That's been a major problem with tcl, and I don't quite understand why those folks can't see that. It certainly would have made tcl the ideal language, if they'd just cared a little more about not constantly turning tcl apps into legacy apps. OTOH, perl seems to have just one _really_ incompatible step, going from the very old 4.036 to the more recent 5.* versions. I don't split the 5.* versions apart, because the backwards compatibility is really there. As long as we keep the system perl up to date (and Mark's done a great job of watching perl) then we've heard no complaints, have we? Granted, buildwise, it's a PITA, but that doesn't change the arguments WRT tcl. I wouldn't want to suggest a different scripting language (and there ARE others that would qualify) because perl is becoming as much of a required tool as, say, grep ... changing it out for something that builds easier isn't an option ... you'd need to keep perl anyhow, you'd just get to build it later in the process. Is it worth that? ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- Chuck Robey | Interests include any kind of voice or data chuckr@glue.umd.edu | communications topic, C programming, and Unix. 213 Lakeside Drive Apt T-1 | Greenbelt, MD 20770 | I run Journey2 and picnic (FreeBSD-current) (301) 220-2114 | and jaunt (NetBSD). ----------------------------+----------------------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
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