Hi,
On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 05:22:32PM +0200, José Luis Tallón wrote:
> [...]
> Thank you (not that I have anything to do with this package, but all
> work is welcome)
:-)
> > I have even rewritten dhelp_parse, one of the main utilities, in Ruby [4]
> > (mostly because it's a huge PITA finding and fixing bugs in a largely text
> > processing program... written in C). It maintains compatibility with the
> > documentation database, so it's a drop-in replacement. At least it should :-)
> >
> Ruby is not among the "standard" installation. May I suggest PERL instead?
> (Not that I prefer PERL to Ruby -- this is just for dependencies' sake)
Well, I first thought about Perl, too, when I proposed Stefan to rewrite
it... But later I thought that Ruby is now more or less popular in Debian (you
can see references to it from time to time on Planet Debian, for example, and
there is a Ruby package maintainer group), and dhelp isn't a required package
anyway, so it's not like we're forcing everyone to install Ruby. And last, but
not least, the Ruby version is already written, working, and has a (small,
admittedly) test suite.
Now dhelp_parse.rb is VERY readable (IMHO) and it's pretty easy to change
stuff (and has some cool features the C version didn't, BTW). I don't think we
could have achieved that easily in Perl (but I don't want to start a flamewar,
so I won't argue ;-) ).
Regards,
--
Esteban Manchado Velázquez <zoso@debian.org>
EuropeSwPatentFree - http://EuropeSwPatentFree.hispalinux.es
Help spread it through the Net in signatures, webpages, whatever!
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature