On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 07:39:34PM +0200, Marc Espie wrote: > A final word. > > For all you backseat drivers: this is OpenBSD. > > Those who do the work get to call the shots.
In reading the thread, I don't get the impression that anyone is second-guessing just that people thought it an interesting decision and couldn't find the relevant discussion in the archives to learn how that decision was made. > I did get permission from my fellow developers to switch our pkg_* to > perl once I made a strong enough argument. It is this argument in which I think the OP was interested. > 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. It certainly fills up a disk (or it did before disks were insanely huge) to have 5 (?) apps that you really want and they all depend on a different language interpreter. > 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. > I like that OpenBSD takes some strong stances. If I have a problem to solve, I'll look around to see if its already been solved. If there's a similar but not portable solution in OpenBSD, I like to look at why OpenBSD did something in some way that may be applicable. Doug.
