A final word. For all you backseat drivers: this is OpenBSD.
Those who do the work get to call the shots. I did get permission from my fellow developers to switch our pkg_* to perl once I made a strong enough argument. A huge part of the argument was the actual code. I did write tools that work. I did write an infrastructure that still grows, stays coherent, and is still fairly easy to manage. These pkg_* are the first in the BSD world to actually support safe updates, without needing to back up most of your system first. Everything-in-perl was a deliberate design decision. What do you think ? that we grow code in a vat with eyes closed ? I've looked very closely at the neighbors, and at our distant cousins. The neighbors manage to live on a weird mix of awk/ruby/perl/python/sh/C. >From a distance, it looks like everyone in NetBSD/FreeBSD has their own favorite language, and is happy to reinvent a square wheel to handle packages in their own language. Well, my tools were written specifically to squash that, to give people a cool enough interface that they would not need to reinvent the world. You prefer python ? tough cookies. Perl and python are more or less equivalent. If you know one, you can write code in the other. Or you're less elite than you think (as a sidenote, I loathe php, yet I run a drupal site, and I have written numerous patches for drupal). The only important difference, for me, was that perl comes with the base install in OpenBSD. And we made a conscious decision to keep it so. That gives us *one* decent high-level script language. OS and distributions are all about editorial choices. Some have given up, and let the user wadle through hundreds of inane choice and a bazaar of half-finished toys. OpenBSD takes some strong stances. We wanted pkg_* that work, we got them. You don't like that they're in perl ? you can always go elsewhere, or, if you have some real balls, write something better in whatever language you want. Have fun, good luck.
