Hello. I'm just some random guy but anyways.
As a user and administrator, I dislike excess dependencies on my system such as Perl but can always just remove the xdg-utils package if I really want to, so having xdg-utils depend on Perl isn't that bad a thing. As a programmer, I don't think C is that bad a language but I also think that not everything has to be in C and as much as I personally detest and hate Perl POSIX shell scripting is much worse. About the pluggable backends thing. I think that would lead to a much cleaner design and also potentially a much lighter system (one could not have installed an xdg-utils-gnome package, an xdg-utils-kde package, etc..). However, I also somewhat think that this sort of genericity maybe should be done via interfaces like DBus because the traditional Unix approach of a program spawning off a helper program is really clunky. First off, helper programs aren't very good at error handling. Helper programs just write errors to standard error and it isn't possible to handle these errors well and maybe retry with a different tactic. Secondly, helper programs are kind of wasteful in that they spawn off a whole process. Maybe I'm just over thinking and over complicating the issue though. After all, these are just little helper utilities. But still, having separate binaries for backends isn't the only form of genericity. Thank you, Steven Stewart-Gallus _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
