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

[Richard Coleman <richardcoleman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > 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...  :-)
>
> 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.

Although great languages, Perl and Python are very large systems
that are still changing (i.e. Perl6).  For use in the base system,
you want something small and relatively unchanging.  In the grand
scheme of things, something halfway between /bin/sh and Perl would
be ideal.  I know the plan9 guys had similar ideas in mind when they
created "rc".  But I think it is still too minimal.  The closest
thing I can think of is perl4 or tcl.

But as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't really matter.  Someone (Matt)
would just need to pick "anything" and bless it (put it in the base
system).  Once the decision is made, then there should be a push
to take advantage of it and "really" leverage the language for such
tasks as user management, package system, build system, etc.

Richard Coleman