new sysinstall

[Robert Garrett]

Richard Coleman wrote:

> Chris Pressey wrote:
> 
>> Or maybe someone could just start me off with why sh + C isn't good
>> enough.  Sure, maintainability is an admirable goal, but in my
>> experience, there's no language that automatically grants you that.  I'd
>> much rather work on someone else's well-thought-out, well-commented,
>> well-written sh script, than their poorly-thought-out, poorly-commented,
>> poorly-written Perl/Python/Ruby/Tcl/PHP program.  *Especially* if it's
>> not "really" Perl/Python/etc, but a crippled fork with its own quirks.
> 
> I can't give you a technical justification.  But I have found it very
> common for large shell scripts to degenerate into an unreadable mess.
> Sure, a really good programmer can write clear, well commented code in
> any language.  And a poor programmer can write unreadable code in any
> language.  But the way I look at it, we are looking for the "sweet
> spot".  In a dynamic environment (which includes any open source OS
> project), a scripting language should result in easier to read, easier
> to maintain code, and should allow greater participation by a larger
> group of people.
> 
> But as Dennis Miller says "Don't take my word for it.  I could be wrong".
> 
> Richard Coleman
> richardcoleman at xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
we arent talking about large shell scripts, at least not much larger than
they already are. 

PHP works very well in the context that it was suggested in, why would
we want to add yet another language or dependency to this?

apache, php, links thats what about 10 meg already?

Rob