RE: 2.4: System Tools - I like them

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 15:59, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> > From: Bastien Nocera [mailto:hadess hadess net] 
> > 
> > On Sat, 2003-05-31 at 16:34, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > > <quote who="Murray Cumming Comneon com">
> > > 
> > > > One thought:
> > > > The backends are written in perl. Does this add any new 
> > or difficult
> > > > dependency to GNOME?
> > > 
> > > No, not really. They're written in perl because any *nix 
> > system worth its
> > > salt has perl already.
> > 
> > Any system on which you can compile GNOME has Perl.
> 
> That is a compile-time rather than a run-time dependency. But I was more
> concerned about the tendency for new versions of perl to break existing perl
> scripts. Or maybe that's less likely if you are better at writing perl than
> I am. 
> 
> This is a problem with Python with RedHat's admin tools, I think. Installing
> newer Python always seems to break them.

This is not an accurate assesment. Moving from Python 1.5 to Python 2.x
created some pain in scripts. However, all of the Python 2.x series have
been nicely backwards compatible so far.

Perl went through a phase where almost every piddly little release
created porting pain (in the early part of the '5' series). However,
that seems to have settled down a bit now.

Malcolm