On 24.02.2012 10:36, Paul Harris wrote:
On 24 February 2012 17:28, Kamil Rytarowski <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 24.02.2012 09:19, Martin Dietze wrote:
On Fri, February 24, 2012, Kamil Rytarowski wrote:
Is possible to propose a patch rewritting wm scripts (like
wmaker.inst)
from BASH to Perl?
Possible? Certainly.
OK, I will rewrite it and then we can compare.
OK. So we have three arguments against.
Not every system has Perl installed.
Do you really want to have wmaker depend on Perl ?
I can say, that not every system has BASH.
Perl v5 is long time standard and is very stable programming language,
it was introduced in the middle of 90'.[1]
Perl is installable on every normal system.
It is a basesystem (or even basesystem-minimal!) of a standard Linux
distribution. It's also in Puppy linux (~100 MB and place for Perl), so
the additional dependency is false. For sure it's impossible to build
the most minimal Linux system without Perl, it's as needed as sed (or
more because sed is replaceable).
I disagree. For simple, file system centric tasks, shell scripts
are just the technology of choice.
I agree that it's used for simple tasks to execute things, but I disagree about
centric tasks. It's in use o
Just about anybody familiar
with Unix systems can deal with Bourne shell code.
This is a false assumption. If someone can't install a system tray in WM, don't
assumpt that this person can edit install scripts.
> Having taken a quick look at the current wmaker.inst code I
think that it is fairly readable.
If we assumpt that in this random part:
FILES="$(cd "$GLOBALDEFDIR"&& ls -d *)"
all=""
for i in $FILES; do
if [ ! -d "$GLOBALDEFDIR/$i" ]; then
if [ -f "$GSDIR/Defaults/$i" -a -z "$BATCH" ]; then
echo "The configuration file \"$i\" already exists in your
defaults database."
echo "Do you wish to replace it?<y/n/a> [n] $all"
if [ "$all" != "a" ]; then
read foo
if [ "$foo" = "a" -o "$foo" = "A" ]; then
all="a"
fi
fi
if [ "$foo" = "y" -o "$foo" = "Y" -o "$all" = "a" ];
then
copy "$GLOBALDEFDIR/$i" "$GSDIR/Defaults/$i"
fi
else
copy "$GLOBALDEFDIR/$i" "$GSDIR/Defaults/$i"
fi
fi
done
there is a bug, then it's harder to debug it then in a more modern language
like Perl, Python etc.
I cannot see any improvement
that could result from rewriting it in Perl apart from
introducing new bugs.
A bug itself isn't an improvement.
Improvement is a usage of more modern technology. Even if this may
result in efforts due to switching.
But ok, if everybody is against, then I won't propose the patch. Even if
it would make things cleaner and simpler.
[1] "Perl 5.000 was released on October 17,
1994."<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl#cite_note-11> from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl
