Re: Thanks Apple! You snubbed perl yet again!

[jeremiah]

On Oct 19, 2007, at 2:51 AM, Chris Devers wrote:

On Fri, 19 Oct 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Oct 18, 2007, at 11:40 PM, Chris Devers wrote:

Back to the point, this is what I'm confused about. If what you  
want is,
pretty narrowly described, Debian's distribution system, then why are
you looking elsewhere? Are you saying Apple should adopt it wholesale?

Yes, I think I am.


I can't picture Debian taking the effort to port what they're doing  
to a
new platform,

Ubuntu, Mempis, Knoppix, debian platforms abound. The debian  
packaging systems lends itself to building new platforms.

and expectially not a proprietary one, so it would have to
be a case of Apple either backporting Debian's patches & packages, or
duplicating the effort with the same intent but from scratch. I'm not
sure I can picture either of these things happening.

I can draw a picture for you: http://finkproject.org/

Within a stable release of the OS (10.3.x, 10.4.x, 10.5.x, etc),  
there's
only security updates -- which, iirc, is exactly what Debian does.

Yes, except that security fixes are available through apt-get  
immediately. So you update with a 'pull' instead of waiting for a  
'push.'

When transitioning between major releases (10.3 -> 10.4, 10.4 ->  
10.5),
things are updatedto the currently available stable version -- which,
iirc, is also exactly what Debian does.

How is this so different?

As for community software, you've got me there. I can't think of any
examples at all of Apple offering things to the community. Aside from
Webkit.

WebKit is a winner.

And launchd.

Does anyone other than Apple even use this?

Oh and Bonjour. Oh and CUPS,

Yes Apple maintains this now, and that is pretty cool, you're right.  
But it came from somewhere else.

if you're in to that
whole "printing" thing on your Debian machines.

I try to avoid it. :-)

Oh and well I guess
Darwin & the mach kernel also count.

Such popular software that people are staying away from it in droves.

Oh and I think some patches back to
the GCC suite, last I checked.

So that other free software can run 30% slower on the same chip  
architecture.

But aside from those examples, you're
right, there's absolutely no community software available from Apple,
and certainly there doesn't seem to be any on CPAN.

I want 5.10 to work without hassle on OS X (Leopard).

Maybe we need to define "hassle", but the concensus from everyone else
seems to be that installing your own copy is unlikely to be difficult,
once it comes out. Remember: a lot of the core Perl developers are Mac
users, so they'll already have been testing it there during  
development
rather than just porting to it post-release.

I have already conceded to those more knowledgeable than I, and that  
includes nearly everyone on this list, that I am wrong here. I, as a  
developer, should maintain the latest version of perl on my machines.  
I give in!

I want my code to be run cross platform (I am talking CGI here -  
still
there are big differences between LAMP and {M,A}AMP)

Care to elaborate?

Yes I really ought to, but I have little concrete info to provide at  
the moment. I am struggling with a bug that appears on OS X with  
apache 1.3.33 but not on linux with apache 2.0. I am not sure where  
the bug is. It is quite uncharitable of me to cast aspersions on  
Apple for this bug, since it is probably my own lousy code, but hey,  
I own Apple shares so I feel I have a right to criticize.

Most generic CGI scripts will run with only minor
modification on most versions of Perl, including Windows.

Indeed, and that is one of the things that makes perl so remarkable,  
it is amazingly cross platform.

If you want the same code to run verbatim on a bunch of different
platforms, I think the general wisdom is that you're going to have to
target a common denominator, which will mean both [a] a version of the
software that is available on the shipping versions of everything you
target, and [b] a subset of the language functionality that has been
proven to work on all the target platforms you're thinking of.

If you go against either of those assumptions, then of course  
things are
not going to be as smooth as you're hoping for.

Thank you, good advice which I will try to follow.

I want the time and effort I invested in learning perl to be useful
for developing native applications on Mac OS X. (I am willing to  
learn
how to use CamelBones to accomplish this. Right now I think it best I
learn Objective-C.)

"Native" contradicts "cross-platform", but whatever. As Sherm said,
you'll be able to do this, but it's not going to be bundled (and
therefore you may have a harder time packaging anything written  
this way
for general release distribution on Leopard, unless you also bundle  
up a
copy of Camelbones et al).

Keep in mind that Ruby & Python will also work for this, and  
<blasphemy>
they're both pretty good languages, too </blasphemy>.

I have not said anything negative in regards to those two fine  
programming languages, in this thread.

I am just asking for a reasonable, up-to-date, development  
environment
so that I do not have to shell into a linux server to do the job I
need to do.

So target the release version, or do like everyone else that's  
concerned
about this and install your own Perl. It's not hard to do, and it's
really not that different than how things are on Debian.

Yes it is. debian's packages are updated constantly, not just in  
point releases. So if there is a problem a new package is made  
available relatively quickly. All you have to do is call `apt-get  
update` and you have the new packages with dependency handling built  
in! (Even better than CPAN's because CPAN's can only handle perl  
dependecies while apt-get can handle system dependencies.) If a bug  
appears in apache I have to wait for a new point release or  
infrequent security update from Apple or hope that the fix has  
propagated to fink which doesn't move as fast as debian and is a  
couple of upstream releases behind[0].

If Apple supported fink with resources, or just unified the way free  
software is installed on OS X, I am convinced it would see a positive  
response from developers and system administrators, leading to new  
software for the platform, more deployment, profits, etc. Right now,  
you have to go through Darwinports.com, Macports, fink, or compile  
from source. If a free operating system built by volunteers can do  
this why can't Apple? And why is everyone on my case because I want  
that? Honestly? Is it _that_ unrealistic? Are these things that no  
one else cares about? Have I lost my marbles?

        Jeremiah

[0]  fink: apache2                      2.0.55   OS X
      apt-get: apache2                  2.2.4     ubuntu 7.10
      apt-get: apache2                  2.2.6     debian/sid
      compile from source       2.2.6        *