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hi Jonathan,
On Sun Sep 22, 2024 at 5:05 PM CEST, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
On Wed Sep 4, 2024 at 8:33 PM BST, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote:
incidentally, lots of Debian native code is in perl, and like it or
not, we should allow for, or even encourage [0] (partial) rewrites if
we want to attract new contributors, especially below the average DD
age
I have some sympathy with this idea, but I'd love to see a rigorous exploration of it. I probably fall on the greybeard side of the dividing
line now, and my Perl is rusty (but not non-existent). Partly I wonder
if we are underestimating younger folk by suggesting that grokking old
stuff like Perl is Too Hard. Or maybe the issue isn't difficulty, but
that doing so is simply unattractive?
it's popularity, not difficulty
If we did have consensus that Perl should be retired, the question
should be replaced *with what*? I'd be very surprised if we could get consensus on that; but I'd happily read people's suggestions. I guess
you'd advocate for Rust or Go, based on your slide deck.
I see many people I admire here that are happy with perl, so going against perl would make no sense to me. more generally, I'm pretty sure that any project-wide
conversation for or against any single language would be a waste of time, at best
all I'm suggesting is for all of us to be open minded with people that want to use languages that are not well-established in Debian native software
What criteria are important for such a recommendation?
I'm not sure that we could converge on a recommendation, nor that it would be of
any use if we were to -- except perhaps in a team-local scope. fwiw, some ideas:
- popularity, accounting for fitness for purpose (e.g. no php and js, as
mentioned elsewhere in this thread)
- readability
- maintainability
as an example, I've rewritten adequate(1) from perl to go. the perl version was absolutely fine, I just couldn't see myself writing perl for fun in my free time. and I feel more optimistic about finding co/new maintainers given that it's in go
(Please, not Python :P)
not a big fan either, but python scores pretty high in terms of the first two criteria above
Title: Rewrite in Golang/Rust BTW
* Rewrite the same thing using a different language OR...
* Start fresh with better defaults and UX
that pointer was to highlight that the idea of rewrites resonates with at
least one other DD, and less so about go/rust
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