Re: Suggestion: Replace Perl with Lua in the OpenBSD Base System

On Tue, Dec 31, 2019 at 10:45:34PM +1000, Stuart Longland wrote:
> On 31/12/19 3:54 pm, Marc Espie wrote:
> > Contrary to what some people might think, the tools in question won't be
> > easier to understand and manage if written in another language.
>
> I'm of the opinion that "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". What is
> "broken" about Perl that we're trying to fix with a replacement (whether
> it be Lua, Python, NodeJS, Ruby, PHP, TCL, alb, BASIC … or something else)?

It used to be there was no choice at all.

Back then, perl was already in the base system and running on everything
*including vax*. Python (for instance) not so much. The standard build
definitely requires shared libraries.

We did retire vax, and we no longer have any platform without dynamic
libraries.

As for the license, python's license appears fairly similar to Perl's
artistic license. I would worry a bit about the strong terms in

6. This License Agreement will automatically terminate upon a material breach of
its terms and conditions.

for which no equivalent is visible in Perl's license.


You got to remember though that OpenBSD initially had a lot of stuff that
was not BSD licensed (the full toolchain!), but used for building (we got rid
of the fp emulation code fairly early on). Though that has changed on some
platforms (hurray for clang pre-apache license), I suspect there might be
some reticence to importing more stuff that's not strictly under a BSD/MIT
license.