On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 08:30:33AM +0200, Javier Barroso wrote: > Hi, > 2009/6/25 明覺 <shi.min...@gmail.com>: > > I do not have time to read your replies about another discussion > > anymore for they are useless, and I do not feel happy with all you > > debian guys, so I leave this mailing list, also debian has no > > attraction to me anymore, I will stop using it from now. > > As I have decalared, I will build my own OS and applications by a > > "Only One Programming Lanuguage" way. > > Good bye! :) > > Your original question was about installing debian without perl, it is > not possible now. If you want to do it, you would have asked in > debian-devel, because debian users can't do anything with this issue.
Given the ghastliness of maintaining Perl code, rewriting it in C++ does have a certain attraction. However, one first has to understand what the code *does*, and a few thousand lines of uncommented regular expressions are a fairly impenetrable mess! I've been maintaining the "sbuild" package in Debian for a few years now. It's written in Perl, and is a core part of our package autobuilding infrastructure, also used by individual developers for cleanly building packages prior to upload. I once had the desire to rewrite it in C++, but even for this one smallish (but rather complex) program, this is a very time consuming challenge. It's taken several *years* of my spare time (I'm a Biologist IRL) to refactor it do the point where it's mostly understandable and clean, and this is not even yet complete. Once this is finally done, conversion is a remote possibility. But this will likely never happen due to the sheer man hours required, as well as the danger of breaking such a critical tool. If I was employed full-time to work on it, it would only be a few months of work, but as it is, I have my real job to do as well... When you scale this problem up to all the *working and tested* tools and programs currently used, one would soon conclude that the cost/benefit of changing is too high. Perl certainly has its place for more complex scripts; it's when it gets to be too large and require long-term maintenence that one finds it is less than ideal. What I would give for static analysis and compile-type type-checking! Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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