Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-sorcery - Re: [SM-Sorcery]Re: CVS: sourcemage/sorcery/usr/sbin scribe,1.12,1.13

sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Discussion of Sorcery related topics

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Sergey A Lipnevich <sergeyli AT pisem.net>
  • To: Nick Jennings <nkj AT namodn.com>
  • Cc: Ryan Abrams <rabrams AT sourcemage.org>, sm-sorcery AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Sorcery]Re: CVS: sourcemage/sorcery/usr/sbin scribe,1.12,1.13
  • Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 10:03:14 -0400

May I be forgiven for the following by the mighty Penguin.

I'm a developer, that's what I do, so I'm simply being as objective as my experience allows me. Try doing a ten point comparison of Perl documentation on the web like CPAN and friends (I imagine: no cross references, no "see also", no up-to-date info, no "special cases" information, no separate function name search, no easy module tree/index, ...) with PHP.net, and you'll understand what I mean by documentation which a developer can use.
Compiling something means a big new can of worms, if you don't trust me, trust the industry, all these Virtual Machine-based (Microsoft calls them "managed") development environments like Perl, Python, PHP, Java, C#, R, etc, didn't come into existence because people where happy with C++. And don't get me wrong, I've just been subjected to a C++ interview, and I assure you I still exhaustively /know/ and /love/ the language, though I've been mainly into Java lately.
Speaking of Java, BTW, if somebody ever gives me a good case for using GCJ I'd consider. Otherwise, a good Java platform needs a clustered J2EE app server which would spawn multiple VMs in different processes whenever necessary, like Apache 1 and 2 (God bless) does, to be any closer to current stable architectures. Speaking of which, in turn, there must be something wrong with Java if one can have PHP as Apache module, Perl as Apache module, heck, even FastCGI as Apache module, but no Java module, only a gateway into a VM in a separate process.
Pyhton I simply don't know. I've did some ViewCVS tailoring for my needs that's all, but it took me some time to understand why the compiler would spit out errorrs because I had improper TAB character.
Bash/awk/sed/? do not have a lot of this stuff, and their documentation is a handful of man screens, but the good thing about them is that they work, it's difficult to crash them, you can spawn processes if you need resilience. They rely on the file system which, being usually neglected, is still the best storage system imaginable. Maybe they are slow, old, and bad-looking, but that's another story ;-).

One thing that constantly amazes me about sorcery is that it's easy and flexible. When I was using RH, I was from time to time confronted with the need to install something with different options/version/binding/linkage, and it simply is a nightmare. You'd install it alright, but you'll have to maintain and support it, and that's where bad things start happening. Sorcery goes the hard way: make things look like the admin is doing it him/herself, but organize and tidy up everything that's too boring to do manually, but has to be done to ensure you can get back to your system in a month and find out what's up without remembering much. I don't see a better fit for such system than GNU toolset (bash/awk/sed) coupled with UNIX-ish approach to a service system design, if I may say so. Packaging management system is not an application, after all, it's a system function.

I am being difficult, but in a subtly different way, sorry ;-)!

Sergey.

Nick Jennings wrote:

On Thu, Oct 24, 2002 at 07:23:57PM -0400, Sergey A Lipnevich wrote:

Well, I'm in the wrong mood today, so I'd defend bash. Java doesn't have destructors, Python has requirements for whitespace placement, Perl has outrageously bad documentation (IMO), C++ (my favorite) you have to compile... And only Bash has all the beauty of the world in it except for one small thorn: $IFS. What we're discussing is really the proper use of tools at hand.


* C++
Who cares if it's compiled?

* Python
So? Why is that a reason

* Perl
What makes you say that? There are more Perl books that Bash/Python combined.

* Java
Well.. I don't think anyone want's these tools in Java, that's just wrong.


I think you're just being difficult :)

- Nick




------------------
Get free mailbox 20 Mb at http://www.hotbox.ru



Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page