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
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
