new sysinstall

[Steve Mynott]

Matthew Dillon wrote:


    Problems with using high level languages like Ruby, Python, etc...

    * They have big library dependancy sets, which makes them somewhat fragile
      in regards to us being able to generate a release environment (everything
      is a moving target).
    * They have a big CD footprint.

    * There are issues with having multiple versions installed... a
      'system' version installed by the CD which is often older then
      the current release version that you might need in production.
I was surprised to discover ruby is the much the same size as php4 when 
installed.

1.9M Aug 31 18:13 ruby-1.8.0.tar.gz
4.4M Aug 31 18:21 php-4.3.3.tar.gz
7.6M    /usr/local/ruby-1.8.0
7.2M    /usr/local/php-4.3.3
(Perl and Python take about 40M)

Ruby is very Python like and TK etc is available.

http://www.rubycentral.com/book/index.html

PHP is very much geared to web templating and if you want to write PHP 
shell scripts you have to wrap the code in <? ... ?>

It's very easy in these languages to write a simple webserver in a few 
lines of code so it's possible you could even drop the Apache 
requirement for the install.

-- Steve