Circumstance leading up to removal of perl from base?

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

On Sat, 21 Jun 2008, Kris Kennaway wrote:

> Dan Mahoney, System Admin wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> 
>> I know it was a long time ago, but I was talking with a co-worker about why 
>> perl was removed from the base in v5 -- I seem to recall a discussion on 
>> some mailing list about either the number of arguments or the format of the 
>> arguments and/or output of a base perl function having changed between 
>> 5.005 and 5.6.1.
>> 
>> Thing is, that's a very vague thing to try to google for, and I can't seem 
>> to find it.  Are there any old-timers who remember the system call in 
>> question?
>
> I dont think it was that.  AFAICR the issue was mostly that it was a *lot* of 
> work to mangle the perl build into bmake format so it would build with make 
> world, and it was also difficult to avoid conflicts with other versions of 
> perl that needed to be installed for port builds.  It was just too difficult 
> to maintain in the base system, especially when nothing used it.

Yeah, most of my recent re-reading is showing that...but there's something 
so distinct in my mind that I'm recalling, some function that changed its 
meaning, return values, and/or number of arguements around that time.  I 
realize that may not be the ONLY reason, and I'm seeing a lot of the 
predominant other....still, this is going to bug me, now.

I could of course just be insane.

Personally, I miss the adduser written in perl -- there's a feature that 
was in that version that's not in the current (integration with /var/yp 
and the ability to automagically run make in that dir).

-Dan

-- 

"When I'm lost, and confused, and trying to make a U-turn, nothing annoys
me more than someone telling me to watch out for the tombstone!"

"How often does that happen, Fab?"

-David Feld & Tom Fabry, sometime in High School.

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
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