Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

Andreas Fuchs asf at void.at
Fri Jul 25 02:07:09 PDT 2003


On 2003-07-24, Richard Coleman <richardcoleman at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Although great languages, Perl and Python are very large systems
> that are still changing (i.e. Perl6).  For use in the base system,
> you want something small and relatively unchanging.  In the grand
> scheme of things, something halfway between /bin/sh and Perl would
> be ideal.  I know the plan9 guys had similar ideas in mind when they
> created "rc".  But I think it is still too minimal.  The closest
> thing I can think of is perl4 or tcl.

Hm. I don't know if I'll get roasted to death for this, but may I
recommend the Scheme Shell (http://www.scsh.net/) for this kind of
thing? it's higher-level than sh, cleaner than perl and has pretty good
regular expressions and POSIX support (all those statements are part of
my humble opinion, of course).

Full Installed size is 17MB, as compared to the ~25 MB that perl
requires on my system; but I'm sure we could strip that down even more
with a special heap image and without sources.

Sorry for naming MFTL[1] in an MFTL thread, though (-:
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf at xxxxxxx>, asf at xxxxxxxxx, antifuchs
[1] My Favourite Toy Language. Apply the standard advocacy disclaimer.





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