Re: PKGSRC will be officially supported as of the next release

[Andreas Hauser <andy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

dillon wrote @ Sat, 3 Sep 2005 09:37:33 -0700 (PDT):

>     The problem with using languages like that is often that they require
>     significant infrastructure just to work.  It's a big problem for a 
>     package manager to have to have a dozen libraries and fifty megabytes
>     worth of packages installed before the package installer itself will
>     run.  We've encountered this issue just trying to make 'cvsup' and
>     perl-driven programs work on multiple occassions.

That is because only C is in base.
Some of the scripting languages are moving targets which leads to problems.
But it's not like there are no changes needed for each and every gcc release.
Some are smal and not moving at all and i think those make good languages
for package systems.
Scheme
    Many implementations to chose from.
    The chicken implementation a scheme to C compiler comes to my mind
    as a good fit. It already has package management for its own extensions.

Lua
   is very light weight and easy to embed. It's used by the ion window
   manager. It is functional with ruby like syntax

If you want somehting still more basic there is the plan9 rc shell
and the zsh shell which would be a good addition to the base system
anyways.

Why perl was removed i never really understood. It would have sufficed
to strip it down to a bare perl interpreter and a different name, like
say "systemperl".


Andy