Re: [Administrivia] On ruby and contrib/

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 6, 2013, 18:24 UTC
Message-ID: <CAMP44s1QotO7yx7reiLdxd61VoZNOTUTWja7ed1G7E9mEJEdrA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <rmisj0vnorm.fsf@fnord.ir.bbn.com>

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 12:16 PM, Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com> wrote:

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>
> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> That ignores the 99% of people who use packaged versions.

The 99% of people who use packaged versions wouldn't care about the additional dependency.

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>>> 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.
>
> It's not about what I want.

It is exactly about what you want.

You use the argument that 99% of the people use packaged versions, yet you ignore the fact that 99% of the people don't care about a single extra dependency (specially one that would be transitory). It is all about 1% of the users, in fact, not even that, because of this 1% of users who dread extra dependencies, most of them would be happy that it's only temporary, and eventually a heavier dependency would be replaced with a lighter one. It is for all intents and purposes only you, the person you are speaking on behalf of.

If the Git project considers a new dependency that would be needed in addition to Perl for a finite period of time, your argument does absolutely nothing to block this route.

-- 
Felipe Contreras