On 2/10/2010 8:30 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> I'm a pretty good perl hacker. I often refer to perl as my Swiss army
> knife. However, using perl on the scale Cfengine is designed to handle
> would be difficult. Having to keep a collection of perl modules, and
> dependencies, all at the correct version across dissimilar UNIX platforms,
> some of which are years behind, would be difficult.
Have you had any bad experiences in this regard? I've considered perl
to be the most meticulously backwards-compatible language I've ever seen
and am fairly sure that scripts I wrote under perl version 1 would run
unchanged today with the single exception of how @ is handled in
double-quoted strings. By contrast, python has broken thing regularly
in its much shorter life - even rpm and yum within the same
distribution, supposedly maintained together. Even things I wrote in
K&R C back in the day would likely need more changes than perl code to
run today.
> One of the nice
> things about Cfengine is that it is mostly self contained with few
> dependencies.
I'm not sure I follow this. The part that is important to me is whether
I have to do my coding work over again and whether things break during
updates as a result of gratuitous language changes - and being
self-contained just means I have to do more of this work myself as
special cases. If cfengine were included in distributions that update
and I had started with cfengine v1, would most of my code still be
running today? If that's not the case historically, should I expect it
going forward any more than I should for python?
--
Les Mikesell
[email protected]
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