Weekly Edition
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Quotes of the week
For an added bonus make sure the rant includes something highly
quotable and funny as a put down, then you'll make lwn.net as well
-- Alan Cox
We need a sane scripting language available to the kernel build,
and given all the problems we have had with different versions or
even just sometimes different builds of sh, awk, and even bc --
plus the fact that those utilities just don't necessarily do what
we want makes it very frustrating. Personally I think a dependency
on Perl is better than the mess we're in; I understand other people
disagree. What is definitely not acceptable, however, is the
status quo. The situation is, quite frankly, ridiculous enough
that perhaps the right thing to do is to write a small scripting
engine and bundle it with the kernel.
-- H. Peter Anvin
The two-week merge window is _not_ supposed to be "one day merge
window after thirteen days of silence". In fact, I think that next
time around I'll make the merge window be 11-12 days instead, and
people who try to game the system and do a last-minute pull request
will get a surprise, and get unceremoniously bumped to 2.6.35
instead.
-- Linus Torvalds(Log in to post comments)
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 24, 2009 11:15 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Surely there are enough scripting languages in the world without writing another one? If size is a factor, maybe Lua would do. However, Perl was actually designed to replace awk and other Unix tools, so it would be the easiest option and is available everywhere already.
Javascript Posted Dec 24, 2009 12:27 UTC (Thu) by markc (subscriber, #4419) [Link]
Yes, Javascript for the kernel. LUA might be lighter but no other scripting
language will ever have a chance of becoming universally acceptable in all possible scriptable enviroments; browser DOM, server side, desktop and console... so why not the kernel too.
GromJS is a 1.6Mb SpiderMonkey 1.7 implementation that provides both CGI and
Javascript Posted Dec 24, 2009 19:02 UTC (Thu) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]
/me imagines the kernel developers boring out and tweaking a javascript engine. <toothy grin>
great idea! Posted Dec 25, 2009 9:40 UTC (Fri) by ccyoung (guest, #16340) [Link]
actually a great idea - dom for the kernel - a place to hang everything meta plus a browser interface!
Javascript Posted Dec 29, 2009 14:52 UTC (Tue) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link]
Ohmigawd, thank you!
I've been trying to find a good way of messing around with javascript outside of a browser, looks like GromJS's console jscli will be the winner!
Standard build tools Posted Dec 25, 2009 14:23 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]
When postgresql was being ported to windows there was a need for a portable scripting language. They standardised on perl in part because you can get it to run just about anywhere, even windows.
The intention was to not require it on UNIX systems but as it turned out some bits were missed but no-one ever complained. Apparently no-one had tried to compile postgres on a system without perl installed. Whatever you may think of it, it *is* everywhere.
Standard build tools Posted Dec 26, 2009 1:58 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
no, perl is not everywhere
perl is on normal desktop systems, it is on server systems that would run postgres, but it is not always on small systems (netbooks, embedded, etc)
it's also not a fast thing to port to a new architecture, and if you are trying to get a self hosted environment going on a new system, having to get perl running before you can compile a kernel is a significant amount of additional work.
If perl was being used for really important, complicated things there may be justification for requiring it, but as Rob Landley has shown with his patches to remove the perl dependancy in the kernel build process, it's not used for very much.
Standard build tools Posted Jan 7, 2010 19:42 UTC (Thu) by abadidea (guest, #62082) [Link]
If a system is incapable of hosting Perl (and my PDA has perl), should you
really be compiling the kernel directly on that system?...
(IDC about the perl thing one way or the other, just saying.)
Standard build tools Posted Jan 9, 2010 7:54 UTC (Sat) by jmm82 (guest, #59425) [Link]
Many embedded devices use microperl, but they also cross compile their
builds on another system, anyways, so it does not really matter if the actual device has perl.
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 26, 2009 5:31 UTC (Sat) by tux1968 (guest, #58956) [Link]
If the kernel build system needs a scripting language, might I suggest CML2 ? <ducks>
Quotes of the week Posted Dec 29, 2009 11:21 UTC (Tue) by eparis123 (guest, #59739) [Link]
Scheme? ;)
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