Re: Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

[Garance A Drosihn <drosih@xxxxxxx>]

At 1:25 AM +0200 7/25/03, ibotty wrote:
>  > I think we can have a high-level scripting language in
>  > the base system, as long as we do not use the "real name"
>  > for it.  Users would still have to install the real
>  > language from ports.

> despite of this, i think having good high level languages in
> base will speed up developing user software, which is a good
> thing (tm).

I believe this too.  The trick is to get a large group of
developers to agree on the same language...  :-)

> btw: what about simply renaming perl to perl5.6 (or perl5.8,
> when we upgrade).

IMO, perl has grown so much that it is too large to have
in the base system -- and this situation gets even worse as
the newer versions of perl show up.  Perl also proved to be
a headache when it came to cross-building the base system
for a new platform.

> when no other (ports installed) version is installed,
> perl could point to perl5.6.

For this strategy to work, I think the OS would have to take
a hard line and *avoid* making this base-system language
convenient to use.  The more useful it is as a complete
replacement for the real port, the more likely users will
whine and moan when they want a different version than
happens to be in the base system.

That is also why I'd suggest a stripped down version.  It
should also be explicit that there is no intention to follow
the latest versions of the language as new versions appear.
The language isn't there to pick the winner of the wars
over scripting languages.  It is only there to write scripts
that are needed in the base system.  Period.  If the new
version is 1000 times better than the base-system version,
then we still should not upgrade it -- *unless* it adds
something that the *base-system* needs.

Of course, I imagine it will be impossible to stick to that
hard line, because we'll always find something we want in
the latest version.

--
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@xxxxxxxxxxx
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@xxxxxxx