Re: Floppy X

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

Stephen Early ponders - 
>> A perl Xlib? That's interesting. I wonder why it was written.

<ramble>

It was written because at the time, I had some free time (linux and
kerberos5 weren't around yet) and it seemed like a cool hack :-) Also,
I was trying to replace a chunk of the vast number of programs I ran
at startup time with a single perl script (which set my resources,
finger'ed a few things and sent me "zephyr" messages, and set my X
background -- it had an inline DATA section which was a uuencoded
lz-compressed xwindow dump, so it was totally self contained --
unpack("U") for the uuencode, zcat-in-perl, and then xlib-in-perl.)
Except for the window background setting, it was an improvement, due
to reduced forking (vaxbsd had a fair process startup overhead) and
portability (Athena has supported from 3 to 5 distinct workstation
platforms, making it hard to keep compiled personal programs up to
date. Java might help with this, some year :-)

As was pointed out elsewhere, perl is on the debian default disks,
which is what makes this possibility attractive.

I should really massage it all to use perl5 features some time; the
user-level syntax could be greatly improved with the use of
references. I haven't touched the code at all since 1991, though I
still run it.

</ramble>
					_Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
					Cygnus Support, Eastern USA