On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 02:51:39PM +0100, Mark Murray wrote: > Said Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > Much of the recent furor would have been gone or diminished if the > > FreeBSD tool had not been /usr/bin/perl. > > Sure, but history. We can't do anything about that. > > > /usr/bin/perl is both by > > documentation and by tradition a contract saying: "Hi, I'm the full > > Perl, you can use me". > > I never read it that way. I've never seen anything saying that use > of the core language means you have to swallow the libraries as well.
That's the only sensible interpretation (again, from the viewpoint of a Perl user, the viewpoint of a "kernel-builder" might be different). (Any other interpretation would be painful to document.) If one needs to know that in platform FOO the standard modules BAR and ZOG are not available, Perl has just lost one of its major strengths, portability. The idea is that once you know what Perl release you have, you know what toolkit you have. But yes, maybe it's the to officially considering breaking that dependency. > My reading is that official perls _happen_to_ include the respective That's *your* reading :-) since you've had to use scissors. > modules. It is with some dismay that I discover that this is not > the case, but I am heartened by another direction. That direction > is the one suggesting that perl should be split into "base perl" > + "standard libraries", with the ability to install only "base" > into an OS with the libraries as an option. -- $jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
