FreeBSD: Perl to be removed

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..."

Comments

And now, back to your regularly scheduled UNIX.

[Masque]

Like it or not from a perl perspective, perl shouldn't be required to install the OS any more than X11, tcl, python etc should be. *nix has gotten too fat. Praised be FreeBSD for getting back to its roots! Now I can install a sane perl without having to rip the old one out by its hair.

Ever install HatRed? 240 packages later, you have a 'stripped down' *nix. Talk about losing sight of the original idea....

Re:And now, back to your regularly scheduled UNIX.

[bofkentucky]

At its core, unix is a minimalist system, its kind of a Chinese buffet, small simple tools that chained together make a complete system (meal). No one tool is all knowing and all seeing, hurd and other microkernel types fit this mentality down to the kernel itself, with scheduling, I/O, lock resolution, etc seperated out into little minature daemons. As opposed to windows where it is one giant tangle of dll's and executables. Theres a lot to be said for a system that originally ran in 4K of memory scalling up to some of the monster supercomputing apps we see today with terrabytes of memory, but at its core, the same simple tools dc, sed, awk, a shell, ls, and rm being able to perform amazing tasks.

Re:interesting

[Arandir]

A POSIX system needs a Bourne compatible shell.

Perl from ports is worth it even for -STABLE

[Fweeky]

Not only is it more up-to-date, more easily upgraded, and able to get as bloated as Perl demands, it also includes the excellent BSDPAN.

BSDPAN allows you to install CPAN modules and manage them like any other package (pkg_info, pkg_delete, etc), and for weenies like me who set LOCALBASE to /usr/pkg, makes them LOCALBASE clean, \o/

/usr/ports/lang/perl5 is not just there for completeness. Even if you have Perl installed from base, chances are anyone even remotely interested in Perl will want to replace it with the port anyway.

Now, if only we can convince core to remove sendmail...

#!/usr/bin/perl

[Permission Denied]

Now all my old scripts will break. It wasn't until about a year ago that I started using "#!/usr/bin/env perl" instead of "#!/usr/bin/perl". Are they expecting me to symlink, or what?

Re:Some choice

[Spazzz]

Yeah!

Let's all install two different versions of perl on our boxes. One for the system, and one for the user. I've dealt with this hell on HP-UX 10.20 (which ships with perl 4) and I don't like it much. I know that disk space isn't all that expensive nowadays but still, there's some of us out there who like having a semi-clean filesystem and directory structure.

I applaud FreeBSD for finally starting to do what NetBSD has done since the beginning: Install a base OS and let the user decide what else they want or need. Is it really that hard to install perl from source/pkgsrc/ports or whatever? I run several NetBSD machines, and it never was much of an issue building perl from source and installing it. This is even true for the old VAXServer 3100 that I used to run. Yeah, it took a long time (this thing took 6 hours to compile bash), but wasn't "hard."

-J

Re:Some choice

[duffbeer703]

The only idiotic thing here is your argument.

I'm a Tivoli administrator and run into all sorts of issues because of Tivoli's continued support of perl v4. Perl 4 doesn't support useful features like modules, and the syntax is signifigantly different in a number of areas. But because so many customers invested a fortune in man-hours and consulting time to develop Tivoli scripts and perl-based policies, everyone is going to be stuck with a very old version of perl for the indefinate future.

Perl 5 is going to be a dinosaur just like perl 4 is today. When Perl 7 is out and there's a problem with a server that is a pain in the ass to fix becuase nobody remembers Perl 5 syntax, you'll be in the same boat.

ksh and sh are standardized on all platforms and do a good job. Use them whenever you can.

Re:Some choice

[hoggy]

But they haven't! They are ramming C and sh down the average sysadmin's throat, without the slightest thought about what is appropriate for that sysadmin.

Don't be an ass. What they are doing is making sure that a default install of FreeBSD doesn't require a particular version of perl to be installed.

Great. You can go and add the one you want afterwards.

What is needed is a good, full-featured scripting language that the average sysadmin can master quickly. If I was paying to have my dream OS written, it would be Python, but Perl is good enough.

This is exactly what FreeBSD offers you. After you've installed it. Go add Python. You don't need to worry that the system relies on a particular version of Python, so you can install the one you want. In contrast to RedHat Linux which is wedded inseperably to Python 1.5.2, which has been out of data for about a millennia.

Re:Some choice

[rsd1s1g]

What is needed is a good, full-featured scripting language that the average sysadmin can master quickly. If I was paying to have my dream OS written, it would be Python, but Perl is good enough.

Have you read anything?? Jeez! It just doesn't ship with Perl any more. Nobody said anything about not being able to HAVE it in FreeBSD. You want Python? You want Perl? Install it afterwards! Hey: you can even have the luxury of installing it from source! Quite the novelty, eh?