Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 6, 2013, 15:17 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s07p0vpS_2cjAjB=QWoZjjPSuAm09xwk4BjAAD+hsJrSw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <rmivc5rp9w2.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com> wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

>
> As one of the people who helps maintain git packages in pkgsrc, my
> initial reaction is negative to adding a ruby dependency.  There are
> several not-entirely-related reasons:
>
> git is a core tool that people use on almost the smallest of boxes,
> perhaps even replacing rcs for managing local config files.  On such
> machines, even perl may be large, but a second scripting language seems
> excessive.

You can compile Git without any of them.

Show 5 quoted lines

> On a NetBSD 6 i386 system, the size of the ruby193-base
> binary package (as installed) is 25 MB (vs 15 MB for the git base
> package, which lacks gitk and docs).  (Presently, the git base package
> defaults to requiring python and installing the git_remote_helpers, but
> I think that's a bug.)  perl is 54 MB.

That's only the default, if the default doesn't suit you, don't use the default.

Besides, that doesn't carry any weight if Perl code is replaced with Ruby code, or Python.

It is quite possible to slowly rewrite the Perl scripts, preferably move as much code as possible to C, but the rest to shell, or Ruby. For Ruby, we could maintain both versions at the same time until the new versions are ready, and then the Perl dependency gets deprecated. In this interim time, people that don't want Ruby could use the Perl versions. But I think this is overkill. Yes, ideally we wouldn't want to depend on both Ruby and Perl, but I think it's OK to do that for a while, until the Perl scripts are rewritten.

In the end my point remains unchanged; Perl is declining, so it would be wise for the future to use another scripting language instead.

-- 
Felipe Contreras