Re: lintian -- detecting hundrets of bugs within seconds...
In an attempt to save the world from disaster, Juergen Menden wrote:
> On Fri, 6 Feb 1998, Christian Hudon wrote:
> >
> > Please drop perl and use C. C programs don't even *need* an interpreter
> > taking up space on the hard drive... and even perl is written in C! :-)
That argument about C programmes taking less space is rather bogus.
Ever tried typing
echo 'main(){printf("Hello, world. Im C, and Im BIG!\n");}' > hello.c
gcc hello.c -o hello
du hello
echo '#!/bin/bash' > hello
echo 'echo hello, world. Im bash (or perl or whatever), and Im small'>>hello
du hello
Now, you'll see that the bash (or perl or whatever script) version uses
about 5 times less diskspace than the C version. Generally, scripts are
a _lot_ smaller than C programmes. Yes, you may save a few bytes by
not having to install Perl, but in the end scripts will only save
you space.
(Wheter scripts are better maintainable/reabable/writable is a wholy
different matter. But for diskspace, I'd re-write the whole distribution
in scripts -- even if we were to use 20 different scripting languages, we'd
still reduce the size of our distribution significantly).
> i don't know about phyton. it might very well be a
> _great_ language. and it might be small. nevertheless:
> if every fancy idea get's implemented in yet another
> great language without need we have a problem.
>
> and as far as i can see there is not a single reason
> for forcing 300 developers (310 current developers
> minus estimated 10 which already have phyton installed
> and use it.). well, apart from the personal preferences of
> a single one... :-(
Not just "A single one". But *the*[1] developper that wrote the
scripts, that took the initiative to write them, and that is willing
to maintain them. He says it will cost him a lot less time writing the
scripts using Python[2] than using perl. Now I find it rather silly
when other people say "I don't want python, I think he should invest
the extra time to write it in C/Perl/whateverIhappenToHaveInstalled".
If asked, would you volunteer re-writing the python scripts in Perl?
Would you maintain them as well as done now? If you answer no to
any of those questions, maybe it's better not to aks other maintainers
to waist their time on a scripting language they say is less suited
to the task.
[1] OK, there are two developpers that co-maintain lintian, if I understand
correctly. Only one of them favours python -- but that doens't make much
difference for my reasoning.
[2] Well, actually, I haven't heard him say that yet. I've heard some other
Python freaks say that, though... I assume he says the same --
why else use Python?
--
joost witteveen, joostje@debian.org
The upstream maintainer is allowed to do things different
than Debian, but only if he has good reasons to do so.
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