Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD: Perl to be removed

Posted by Hemos on from the killing-the-perl dept.

zmcgrew writes "From Daemon News:
"The decision was made to remove Perl from the FreeBSD -current base system [earlier story ]. Perl will be supported as a port that the user can install after the base installation, however it will no longer be required. Mark Murray put out a call to the -current mailing list asking for volunteers to port all Perl scripts in the base system to another language, such as sh or C. All critical programs are already being ported, with only a few minor ones left to be claimed." Wow..."

2 of 97 comments (clear)

  1. Some choice by sigwinch · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    But not to get into some religious war, it's nice to see that FreeBSD will leave the choice to us.
    Yeah, you get your choice of C or sh, which are bletcherous languages for system administration. To diagnose/repair a broken C program, you have to be a skilled programmer with a lot of time on your hands. No instant patches/changes are possible. If that little system automation utility written in C breaks in production, the typical business should expect hours of downtime.

    Or there's sh, which you can fix instantly, but you have to learn yet another toy syntax, a syntax that is highly restrictive when it comes to real programming work.

    And what is the justification for this? So it'll fit better on ancient, obsolete harware. Great, my sysadmins will piss away thousands of dollars in labor (and possibly millions in downtime) dealing with shitty languages, because it will save the hundreds of dollars it would cost to replace that old 486 router.

    Equally idiotic are the arguments that using Perl for the core makes it difficult to upgrade Perl. That's because they should be different Perls. For core system stuff, there should be /usr/bin/system-perl, an old, stable, stripped-down Perl that rarely changes. Applications should use /usr/bin/perl, which can be upgraded as needed to make the latest apps run.

    Morons. Hardware cost is almost always irrelevant. Dependency conflicts almost always mean you need to fork. But no, we have to change the admins to suit the machine...

    --

    --
    Kuro5hin.org: where the good times never end. ;-)

  2. You, Maam, are an idiot. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Yeah, you get your choice of C or sh, which are bletcherous languages for system administration.

    Shows how much YOU know.

    Microsoft has made C Sharp run on FreeBSD.

    And you can have csh, zsh, ksh OS sh as a shell.

    Odds are web based adminstration is about all you can handle. (and that too is an option on FreeBSD)