Remove BIND, Sendmail, Perl and etc from base?

[Craig Dooley]

Heres an idea,
	I personally would prefer perl as the language of choice for a scripting 
language, but nobody likes to force the dependancy of perl on people, so...
use compiled perl.  In a bootstrap procedure like debian, it is switched into 
a chroot, and dpkg --explode or whatever is run on all the base packages and 
then installed correctly.  The package manager could be a package.  Using 
compiled perl would allow for just the binary without depending on perl, and 
would only require perl if you were rebuilding the system.  Perl really would 
be much easier than C for a package manager, especially if using databases 
and doing dependancy checking.  Even as a proof of concept, it could get the 
system up and running and people building for the system while things are 
changed, but I think a pure perl version would do just fine.  

-Craig

On Thursday 24 July 2003 09:40 pm, Richard Coleman wrote:
> >> despite of this, i think having good high level languages in
> >> base will speed up developing user software, which is a good
> >> thing (tm).
> >
> > I believe this too.  The trick is to get a large group of
> > developers to agree on the same language...  :-)
> >
> > IMO, perl has grown so much that it is too large to have
> > in the base system -- and this situation gets even worse as
> > the newer versions of perl show up.  Perl also proved to be
> > a headache when it came to cross-building the base system
> > for a new platform.
>
> 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.
>
> But as I mentioned earlier, it doesn't really matter.  Someone (Matt)
> would just need to pick "anything" and bless it (put it in the base
> system).  Once the decision is made, then there should be a push
> to take advantage of it and "really" leverage the language for such
> tasks as user management, package system, build system, etc.
>
> Richard Coleman

-- 
Craig Dooley						 cd5697 at xxxxxxxxxx