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Garance A Drosihn
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 190
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 Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2002 11:56 pm Post subject:
Re: scripting language in base system?
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It seems to me that this topic has nothing to do with "the
package system". It also seems to me that this topic is a
bikeshed of immense proportions, and we shouldn't bury the
very useful discussion on package-system issues with this
bikeshed.
At 11:29 AM -0700 7/15/02, Jos Backus wrote:
| Quote: | On Mon, Jul 15, 2002, Mark Valentine wrote:
I'd like to hear you name one that would fit the bill, never
mind find a concensus...
First we need to decide if we even _want_ a more powerful
scripting language included. It sounds like the current
consensus is a resounding NO. However, applications like
portupgrade are much easier written in a scripting language
than using the standard tools. Scripting languages, for all
their faults, also reach a larger audience of potential
contributors than the standard tools do.
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For what it's worth, I'd like to see ruby in the standard freebsd
system. However, I can easily get into arguments with myself
(never mind anyone else) when trying to pin down my reasoning
for this.
I keep trying to write this message, listing my thoughts on
scripting languages. While I can come up with a list of ideas
that I completely agree with, the problem is that the items
in that list conflict with each other, and thus I can't even
come to a firm conclusion that *I* like. And in the process of
trying, I'd probably manage to irritate everyone who has any
opinion on this matter.
I do not agree with the claim that sh+awk+sed is a adequate
alternative to perl, ruby, or python. I also do not believe that
we'll take the time to write everything in C which we might find
useful, and thus useful things do not get written because we
refuse to include tools which would allow us to write such things.
Portupgrade was written in ruby because it was NOT getting written
in any of the alternatives. So, so far, I've irritated the standard
unix scripters, and the C-programmers...
At the same time, I don't think we can ever "be safe" with some
standard scripting language in the base system, because that
scripting language will change over time. And my guess is that
any good scripting language will eventually evolve into it's own
"OS-neutral" platform, and thus grow into a monster that we won't
want to have in our base system. Thus, any good, standard,
popular, and useful scripting language is probably going to be
a bad choice over time. That claim should manage to irritate
everyone else...
This is an unwinnable debate, imo.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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Mark Valentine
*nix forums addict
Joined: 13 Jun 2002
Posts: 62
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 1:12 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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| Quote: | From: danfe@regency.nsu.ru (Alexey Dokuchaev)
Date: Mon 15 Jul, 2002
Subject: Re: Package system flaws?
Traditionally, UNIX lived for 30+ years without need for a
monster like Perl or Ruby, in the base, clearly showing us that
sh/awk/sed is a [very] decent scripting facility.
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Though I did breathe a sigh of relief when shell functions became common
enough to be useful... ;-)
I've never really wanted for anything since. Except maybe for make(1)
to have a standard conditional syntax.
Cheers,
Mark.
--
Mark Valentine, Thuvia Labs <mark@thuvia.co.uk> <http://www.thuvia.co.uk>
"Tigers will do ANYTHING for a tuna fish sandwich." Mark Valentine uses
"We're kind of stupid that way." *munch* *munch* and endorses FreeBSD
-- <http://www.calvinandhobbes.com> <http://www.freebsd.org>
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Gary Thorpe
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 20 Jun 2002
Posts: 14
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 2:44 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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| Quote: | From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com
To: Mark Valentine <mark@thuvia.demon.co.uk
CC: "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>,Thomas Seck
tmseck-lists@netcologne.de>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Package system flaws?
Date: Mon, 15 Jul 2002 15:01:47 -0700
[...]
"Modularizing the base system" is not a problem; it is the
solution to a problem -- and not just an ends in itself, as your
lack of certainty implies. Performing that task has consequences
significantly above and beyond the direct consequences any casual
observer would expect.
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On the topic of modularity, is an standard, official ABI for FreeBSD
planned? Are there plans for standardizing binary interfaces for kernel
modules. Would any of this (theoretical or actual) allow the kernel to be
updated relatively independently of the rest of the system?
_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
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Terry Lambert
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 19 Mar 2002
Posts: 434
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 4:14 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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Gary Thorpe wrote:
| Quote: | On the topic of modularity, is an standard, official ABI for FreeBSD
planned? Are there plans for standardizing binary interfaces for kernel
modules. Would any of this (theoretical or actual) allow the kernel to be
updated relatively independently of the rest of the system?
|
You're asking two different questions, neither of which have
anything to do with the subject.  .
Not that they shouldn't be addressed, but they should probably
at least be *seperately* addressed (IMO).
-- Terry
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Jon Mini
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 28 Mar 2002
Posts: 20
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 5:32 am Post subject:
An odd scripting language
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On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 09:56:07PM -0400, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
| Quote: |
At the same time, I don't think we can ever "be safe" with some
standard scripting language in the base system, because that
scripting language will change over time. And my guess is that
any good scripting language will eventually evolve into it's own
"OS-neutral" platform, and thus grow into a monster that we won't
want to have in our base system. Thus, any good, standard,
popular, and useful scripting language is probably going to be
a bad choice over time. That claim should manage to irritate
everyone else...
This is an unwinnable debate, imo.
|
Truely.
However, I am intruiged by your assertion here. It implies that perhaps
a good direction to try would be to build a scripting language that is
tied to FreeBSD, but contains elements that makes it easy to pick up
by people who are already comfortable with the popular scripting languages.
This is an interesting concept. Fraught with problems, but nonetheless
interesting.
--
Jonathan Mini <mini@freebsd.org>
http://www.freebsd.org/
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Jon Mini
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 28 Mar 2002
Posts: 20
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 5:40 am Post subject:
Re: An odd scripting language
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On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 12:32:32AM -0700, Jon Mini wrote:
| Quote: |
However, I am intruiged by your assertion here. It implies that perhaps
a good direction to try would be to build a scripting language that is
tied to FreeBSD, but contains elements that makes it easy to pick up
by people who are already comfortable with the popular scripting languages.
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<Holocaine> T BAKA THE WORLD DOESN'T NEED ANOTHER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE. PLEASE
DO NOT ENCOURAGE THEM K THX.
T * PLZ TO NOT BE MAKING MORE LANGUAGES K THX BYE
--
Jonathan Mini <mini@freebsd.org>
http://www.freebsd.org/
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Jordan K Hubbard
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 07 Jul 2002
Posts: 17
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 6:19 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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Guys,
If libh ever makes it off the ground, you can bet that Tcl will enter
the base system fairly rapidly since it will be required for everything
from bootstrapping packages onto the system to actually installing the
system itself. In such a case, you can also rest assured that Tcl
*will* have a more than justifiable purpose and I'm sure that even the
anti-bloatists will be forced to grudgingly concede the point. Their
principle, and successful, objection before was that Tcl entered the
base system long before there was such a demonstrable need for it and
it was justifiably kicked right back out again.
The issue with Perl is orthogonal since it wasn't quite as insinuated
into the brick-and-mortar foundations of the system (some of those
stray .pl admin scripts notwithstanding) and was much harder to
maintain than the _current_ releases of Tcl are. I also agree that Tcl
has had a rocky history in terms of its upgrade strategy ("it must be
Tuesday, time to break API stability again!") but, for better or worse,
development of the language seems to have reached a plateau with 8.4
and API stability ever since 8.0 was released has been pretty good, so
I think the old arguments are simply outdated.
In any case, the anti-bloatists can also leave their pitchforks and
torches in their closets for the time being since all of this is also
contingent on libh finally reaching the point where it is a truly
effective replacement for pkg_* and sysinstall, something which is
still a ways off if it happens at all.
- Jordan
On Monday, July 15, 2002, at 05:34 PM, Jos Backus wrote:
| Quote: | On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 09:44:45PM +0700, Alexey Dokuchaev wrote:
We did have a very powerful one until recently -- Perl. I guess the
fact it was removed from the base is for a very good reason.
I don't think ``we don't want a powerful scripting language in the base
system'' was one of them.
Oh please, can you show us something essential for base enough that
could not be implemented in a sh/sed/awk way? I somewhat doubt it.
portupgrade  (Sure, anything that can be done in Ruby can be done
in C; no
need to make that argument again).
'cmon, it's pretty clear that Perl or Ruby is more of an overhead
than of
worth. Traditionally, UNIX lived for 30+ years without need for a
monster
like Perl or Ruby, in the base, clearly showing us that sh/awk/sed is
a
[very] decent scripting facility.
As must be clear by now, I respectfully beg to differ.
--
Jos Backus _/ _/_/_/ Santa Clara, CA
_/ _/ _/
_/ _/_/_/
_/ _/ _/ _/
jos@catnook.com _/_/ _/_/_/ require 'std/disclaimer'
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-- |
Jordan K. Hubbard
Engineering Manager, BSD technology group
Apple Computer
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Dag-Erling Smorgrav
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 23 Mar 2002
Posts: 110
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 7:24 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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Jordan K Hubbard <jkh@queasyweasel.com> writes:
| Quote: | If libh ever makes it off the ground, you can bet that Tcl will enter
the base system fairly rapidly since it will be required for
everything from bootstrapping packages onto the system to actually
installing the system itself.
|
I'm not a big fan of having Tcl in the base system, but - what are we
waiting for? libh should have entered the tree a long time ago,
there's absolutely nothing to be gained from leaving it out in the
cold.
DES
--
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org
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Poul-Henning Kamp
*nix forums Guru
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 436
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 7:44 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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In message <xzpit3g3u08.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes:
| Quote: | Jordan K Hubbard <jkh@queasyweasel.com> writes:
If libh ever makes it off the ground, you can bet that Tcl will enter
the base system fairly rapidly since it will be required for
everything from bootstrapping packages onto the system to actually
installing the system itself.
I'm not a big fan of having Tcl in the base system, but - what are we
waiting for? libh should have entered the tree a long time ago,
there's absolutely nothing to be gained from leaving it out in the
cold.
|
It was my impression that we had abandonned the "lets put it in the
tree and hope somebody else finishes it" policy long time ago ?
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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Dag-Erling Smorgrav
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 23 Mar 2002
Posts: 110
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 8:10 am Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk> writes:
| Quote: | In message <xzpit3g3u08.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>, Dag-Erling Smorgrav writes:
I'm not a big fan of having Tcl in the base system, but - what are we
waiting for? libh should have entered the tree a long time ago,
there's absolutely nothing to be gained from leaving it out in the
cold.
It was my impression that we had abandonned the "lets put it in the
tree and hope somebody else finishes it" policy long time ago ?
|
"somebody else"? Unless alex@ dropped dead while I wasn't looking,
libh is actively maintained.
DES
--
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org
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Max Okumoto
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 16 Jul 2002
Posts: 3
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 2:19 pm Post subject:
Re: Package system flaws?
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There has been lot of changes going into the code recently. And we are
still working on some of the basic framework. Right now I am working
on refactoring the graphic/text backends. In addition I am adding lots
of comments to the code. The original programmer did not document his
code much.  I would like to wait a little bit more before we move
it into the main cvs tree. The current work and status is accessable
at http://usw4.FreeBSD.org/~libh/
Max Okumoto
Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> writes:
| Quote: | Jordan K Hubbard <jkh@queasyweasel.com> writes:
If libh ever makes it off the ground, you can bet that Tcl will enter
the base system fairly rapidly since it will be required for
everything from bootstrapping packages onto the system to actually
installing the system itself.
I'm not a big fan of having Tcl in the base system, but - what are we
waiting for? libh should have entered the tree a long time ago,
there's absolutely nothing to be gained from leaving it out in the
cold.
DES
--
Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org
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Garance A Drosihn
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 190
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 2:47 pm Post subject:
Re: An odd scripting language
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At 12:32 AM -0700 7/16/02, Jon Mini wrote:
| Quote: | On Mon, Jul 15, 2002, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
At the same time, I don't think we can ever "be safe" with some
standard scripting language in the base system, because that
scripting language will change over time. And my guess is that
any good scripting language will eventually evolve into it's own
"OS-neutral" platform, and thus grow into a monster that we won't
want to have in our base system.
However, I am intruiged by your assertion here. It implies that
perhaps a good direction to try would be to build a scripting
language that is tied to FreeBSD, but contains elements that makes
it easy to pick up by people who are already comfortable with
the popular scripting languages.
|
That is kind of where I'm heading in my own thoughts, but you
immediately run into problems over "what should that language
look like?". I'd like something that looks like ruby, because
I like ruby. I have friends who swear by python, so they'd
probably like something that looked like python.
If I really were to pursue this, I guess I'd first try to figure
out what exactly it is that (say) ruby provides which is missing
from plain sh/awk/sed, and then try to provide that minimal set
of missing capability.
The problem is that I'd rather just write some scripts in ruby than
to try to figure out some new, minimalist scripting language...
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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Garance A Drosihn
*nix forums Guru Wannabe
Joined: 21 Mar 2002
Posts: 190
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 2:58 pm Post subject:
Re: scripting language in base system?
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At 1:19 AM -0700 7/16/02, Jordan K Hubbard wrote:
| Quote: | Guys,
If libh ever makes it off the ground, you can bet that Tcl will
enter the base system fairly rapidly since it will be required
for everything from bootstrapping packages onto the system to
actually installing the system itself.
I also agree that Tcl has had a rocky history in terms of its
upgrade strategy, but, for better or worse, development of the
language seems to have reached a plateau with 8.4 and API
stability ever since 8.0 was released has been pretty good, so
I think the old arguments are simply outdated.
|
When I think about something like this, I wonder if we should
put tcl into the system under some unique name ("tclb"?), just
so *we* can decide if the base-system tcl will change when the
next great tcl API shows up. [the same would apply to ruby or
python in the base system]
One of the big pains with perl in the base system was that we
wanted that perl to remain stable (at least for the entire
lifetime of a freebsd-stable branch), while anyone who used
perl heavily would want new versions of perl as they became
stable. Ie, perl's "stable branch" is not on the same timetable
as freebsd's.
--
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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Mark Murray
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 24 Mar 2002
Posts: 49
|
| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 3:15 pm Post subject:
Re: An odd scripting language
|
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| Quote: | However, I am intruiged by your assertion here. It implies that perhaps
a good direction to try would be to build a scripting language that is
tied to FreeBSD, but contains elements that makes it easy to pick up
by people who are already comfortable with the popular scripting languages.
|
A solution here may be to pick up an earlier scripting language
that has been abandoned, but is nevertheless useful. I'm specifically
thinking of Perl4, but I imagine that TCL, the lisps, the BASICs
and other older "Toy" languages may yield up a useful base for an
OS-specific scripting language.
| Quote: | This is an interesting concept. Fraught with problems, but nonetheless
interesting.
|
Yes. _Very_ interesting :-)
M
--
o Mark Murray
\_
O.\_ Warning: this .sig is umop ap!sdn
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Antony T Curtis
*nix forums beginner
Joined: 24 Jun 2002
Posts: 7
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| Posted: Tue Jul 16, 2002 4:17 pm Post subject:
Re: An odd scripting language
|
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Mark Murray wrote:
| Quote: | However, I am intruiged by your assertion here. It implies that perhaps
a good direction to try would be to build a scripting language that is
tied to FreeBSD, but contains elements that makes it easy to pick up
by people who are already comfortable with the popular scripting languages.
A solution here may be to pick up an earlier scripting language
that has been abandoned, but is nevertheless useful. I'm specifically
thinking of Perl4, but I imagine that TCL, the lisps, the BASICs
and other older "Toy" languages may yield up a useful base for an
OS-specific scripting language.
|
I would suggest REXX... It's a mature scripting language which is
drifting off into the sunset. It is easy to pick up - being a bit like
BASIC... The only thing is - How would IBM react to it?
Actually, I think IBM's Mike Colinshaw would love his language being used...
| Quote: | This is an interesting concept. Fraught with problems, but nonetheless
interesting.
Yes. _Very_ interesting :-)
M
|
--
Antony T Curtis BSc Unix Analyst Programmer
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/antony.t.curtis/
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