Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
Alan Cox:
> Perl is unsuitable for specification. There is no fixed grammar for
> perl.
And which languages *do* have "fixed grammars" in this sense?
Consider that the Bourne shell has never had a published grammar that
actually matched reality, yet it is still the basis for a multitude of
installation scripts.
> Each perl script is potentially precisely dependant on a perl
> revision and may break arbitarily.
Backwards breakage, yes. Forwards breakage, no. (Except for plain
old bugs, which get fixed, and which every program has.) This
situation is *exactly* analogous to Bourne/bash/ksh/etc.
> It sucks but its reality. Majordomo broke on 3 out of 4 "minor"
> revision updates to perl I did.
I'd like specifics on this. However, one recent Majordomo breakage
was just a Perl bug, not a spec change, and it was fixed immediately;
and another Majordomo breakage was actually a Majordomo bug (failure
to follow the documentation).
> The perl community informs me that there is no perl grammar. They
> don't themselves know what is and isnt perl except by feeding it
> through interpreter of the week.
This is gratuitous hyperbole.
> If we standardise on it and bugs (eg security stuff) is found the
> perl community don't back fix old perl.
THIS is a vile lie.
I am personally responsible for continuing the maintenance of Perl 5.4
and 5.5 (recently taken over from Graham Barr), and I (and Graham)
take security issues VERY seriously. I patched a suid security
problem in 5.3 when 5.4 was almost ready. And I released a patch to
5.4 within the last few months, even though 5.5 is the current version
and 5.6 is nearly ready.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. - <chip@perlsupport.com>
"When do you work?" "Whenever I'm not busy."
Reply to: