Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-sorcery - Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...

sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Discussion of Sorcery related topics

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Ryan Abrams <rabrams AT sourcemage.org>
  • To: Tony Smith <tony AT smee.org>
  • Cc: sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Sorcery]Language wars...
  • Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 18:02:57 -0500

Just an FYI re: perl....

Perl is being considered, mainly because it is the least added overhead (its practically required anyway, so it would not require extra base stuff), and also because it is MUCH better/faster at parsing text files and running various algorithms (depends sorting, etc) than bash is. This consideration would be for the sorcery scripts themselves. the spell format would probably dictate a choice of either perl or bash (at the maintainers discretion), and the sorcery api would be exposed through bash executable commands.. so maintainers would still be fine. This would also address most of the issues raised by Sergey and Tony.

The downsides are that perl can quickly get very messy, it isn't our roots, it becomes more complicated then, and perl is then required on a system (it is for many things anyway, but not sorcery itself atm)

In any case, please note that this is VERY VERY early discussion... so there is no need to go all "language wars" over it yet. If perl is introduced, it will probably be in addition to bash, instead of replacing bash entirely.

-Ryan


On Monday, October 7, 2002, at 08:40 AM, Tony Smith wrote:

All,

I wanted to pass on a suggestion for the future direction of sorcery on the
premise that if you don't speak up, you'll never be heard :-)

I know that we regularly endure the round of language wars and it seems that
Perl is under consideration for the future (2.0/3.0) but I have an idea which
would allow us to stay true to our roots and address some of the problems
with the current architecture.

What if the DETAILS file was not written in bash, but just a simple tag=value
format text file that could be easily grep'd or parsed? (Just the DETAILS
file, not the rest)

1. No need for sorcery to source every details file in a tree to find a spell:

find . -NAME DETAILS | xargs grep -l "SPELL=$SPELL"

would be an easy implementation of "gaze where". All commands that work on
sets of spells would benefit from this.

2. The CONFIGURE/BUILD etc. etc. scripts can still be bash so we get all the
benefits of having a build system based on the tools that you'd use to build
these packages interactively. [This is one area where I can see real
problems for a Perl/Python/Ruby/... implementation]

Thoughts?

Tony.


_______________________________________________
SM-Sorcery mailing list
SM-Sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/sm-sorcery





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page