At 09:11 AM 1/5/01 -0600, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 05, 2001 at 09:42:44AM -0500, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> > On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> >
> > > I personally think that the relying on LGPL'ed code is completely
> > > reasonable. Some will disagree, so we need to come to a consensus on
> this
> > > as a community.
> >
> > There are actually a couple of different mostly-independent issues, but
> > yes, we'll need to face them seriously fairly early on, I think. (Not just
> > yet, perhaps, but probably soon.)
> >
> > 1. What are the consequences for those who redistribute software based on
> > or including perl6? This is a licensing issue that I do not feel
>
>If we botch this, this is the point that may stop commercial vendors
>from including Perl in their core distribution, or even building upon
>Perl (as Alan^WSun has already made with Solaris 8 and kstat(1)).
This is definitely a biggie. I really want perl shippable with any piece of
software. Screw Visual Basic, Perl should be the scripting language of
choice for, well, everything! :)
> > competent to address, and hence won't.
> >
> > 2. How do we handle build/install issues?
> >
> > a. Do we insist that users install the package first? If so, what do we
> > do about portability problems? For example, gmp (the GNU multiprecision
> > arithmetic library that's at issue here) hasn't been ported to VMS (at
> > least last time I checked) while VMS is a supported platform for perl.
>
>This is also a biggie. I do not think insisting would be a winning
>solution. Even if the software has been ported to platform
><mumbletyspratz>, any additional piece of software one has to install
>raises the bar of installing Perl. And, if there's no port of a library
><blah> to <mumbletyspratz>, the bar will be even higher. "Let's then
>just port <blah> to <mumbletyspratz>" just isn't a realistic suggestion.
>There are far too many blah-mumbletysptraz combinations out there.
>Everything needs to be optional.
Yes. The things perl needs should be shipped with, and build with, perl.
Everything else should be optional, or as a third-party module installable
via CPAN. We can ship slower or less-functional alternatives (fgmp instead
of gmp for math, for example, the way we do with SDBM) that can be
replaced, but we must have perl as a complete kit, requiring just a
compiler and build tool to build.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
