On Sat, 2006-01-21 at 01:48 -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes: > > > One example is .config maintainer scripts, some of which are quite complex > > and worth writing in a higher-level language than shell. > > This is surely true; Steve Langasek asked if this was a real issue in > Ubuntu or merely a potential issue. > > Granted if it is a real issue, then why not use perl? Yes, I hate > perl too, but really, the argument "hey, people like Python too" > implies that we should have a scheme interpreter, a perl, a python, > emacs lisp, and well, everything anyone might want. > > Or, we say "we aren't going to support *every* high-level language" > and stick to one. There's nothing that prevents us saying "we aren't going to support every high-level language" and stick to more than one (we already stick to two -- sh and Perl). It just means "I'd like to write scripts in X" alone isn't a good enough reason. Python is the "official" language of Ubuntu. If we want to merge work they're doing (Anthony Towns mentioned their work on boot speed, for example) it's a good idea to structure our Python like theirs is. This seems to be a good reason to consider python-minimal and some form of Python in Essential. The real issue here is that the original upload didn't do that; it went through the motions without actually changing our Python packaging or upgrading the version, so we just got all of Python as Essential. No one wanted that. -- Joe Wreschnig <piman@debian.org>
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