Speaking as an NMH leech-user B-), I think the NMH developers and maintainers should get to specify what the preferred development and build dependencies should be. (Which, of course, has no direct bearing on a user that's obtaining pre-built binaries via a package, like I do via Ubuntu. But it might make development, or just building, on "limited" systems harder or impossible.)
Making use of a more modern scripting language for testing, especially if it brings a comprehensive set of testing tools, seems like it would be a win, if it makes it easier to create better or more or more rigorous testing. Would we expect a theoretical new developer to insist on using only older tools? Bob On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 19:01:52 -0400 Ken Hornstein <k...@pobox.com> sez: > Sigh. This is one of those tough ones. It is nice to have a > minimum dependency set, but .... I see where you are coming > from. If we are voting I'd still rather write a simple C > program to do what we need here, but I recognize that may be a > minority view. On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 18:02:58 -0400 David Levine <levin...@acm.org> sez: > And it could probably handle at least some of what's in the > accessory test programs. On the other hand, using an LCD of > POSIX has advantages of portability and minimizing > dependencies. On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 16:01:01 -0500 Eric Gillespie <e...@pretzelnet.org> sez: > If we're going to look at additional requirements imposed on > developers, I would suggest that imposition would bring far > more bang for the buck if it were a proper scripting language > we can write the tests in. This would not only have made this > test-mhical problem easier to fix, but also the other one I > fixed. As Ralph says, we just don't see a way to have derive > two different timestamp formats from a single source of truth > with the tools available to us. But with Perl or any of its > competitors, it would be trivial.