Re: dpkg-scanlibs

[Peter Makholm <peter@makholm.net>]

Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org> writes:

I agree that it would be good to minimize the number of essential
languages in Debian. and personally I would have choosen perl (if I
had to choose between perl and python).

>         2) Converting the scripts is like writing them over from
>            scratch. You get the same kind of bugginess as from a first
>            implementation.

But this is plain wrong. Proof by Authority[0]: In The Mythical Man Month
chapter 11 Fred Brooks says: ``Plan to throw one away; you will,
anyhow.''

Sometimes a complete redesign is a lot better than keeping patching old
broken code. If you keep patching old code the code gets messy and it
becomes hard to figure out which parts of the code that will break by
a change.

0) Just once Knuth shouldn't be the authority.

-- 
Peter