Re: Depends/Recommends?: Linux image packages going to depend on python
Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
>> Yeah, but doing string manipulation in C is fairly painful and
>> difficult to maintain in the long run. I suspect that shell, sed, and
>> awk, despite its disadvantages, would still be easier and clearer than
>> using C for this sort of transformation. (And all of those tools are
>> already essential and likely to be present even on most embedded
>> platforms that would use a full dpkg implementation since they aren't
>> particularly large.)
> I know the intended meaning but I can't help but see the irony of
> recommending tools written in C as a solution for the difficulties of
> handling strings in C . . .
> Proven code etc. etc. but still.
Well, yes. :) But it's about the language in which the code we're
writing for Debian is expressed, since that's the code that we have to
maintain. sed and awk (and Perl and Python, which are also written in C)
get the benefit of lots of other people maintaining them.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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