in reply to no more perl in BSD core

An avid FreeBSD user, I was saddened to see the thread that lead up to this, and even sadder when Mark Murray made it official.

As I understand it, however, Perl will be turned into an optional but (possibly?) installed by default package in a fashion similar to the handling of X11 (think Solaris 8, if you're familiar with how Perl is installed on that) which (w|sh)ould satisfy all those who bellyache over the 'bloat' that Perl adds to core while still keeping the rest of us happy campers ... hardly doom and gloom.

Heck, divorced from core, us FreeBSD users might finally see a better effort of staying in sync with the current stable version of Perl, rather than waiting for the committers to import it into the FreeBSD source tree or by trying to build our own over an already existing 5.005_03 install.

Possibly a more important development out of all this brouhaha (to the Perl community, anyway) is the formation of perl-dist@perl.org to address the evergrowing size of the base Perl distribution(s)...

Excerpted from Johan Vromans Draft manifest...

This list has been started in reaction to an often heard complaint that Perl is becoming bigger and bigger, and its size is keeping people and companies from installing, and using, it. To overcome this problem, the current standard Perl distribution needs to be split into a small core part, and additional modules. The core part needs to be a useful subset capable of real life work, like adding the additional modules. (Although we may want to use industry standard installation tools as well.)

An additional problem is that many of Perl's run-time defaults are actually established at build time. This makes it hard to produce a prebuilt Perl distribution that can be installed flexibly, and additional prebuilt modules that can be added to an arbitrary Perl installation.

Also, for anyone wanting to read up more on this whole situation, I suggest the following (in roughly chronological order).

    --k.


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Re^2: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl
by tadman (Prior) on May 11, 2002 at 05:43 UTC
    The Perl5 installation I have here, complete with modules, is 20MB. A more heavily loaded version I also use is 26MB. How can anyone claim in the age of 160GB hard drives that this is somehow too large?

    I understand there are applications which might require a "mini-perl", such as embedded systems or extremely antiquated hardware, but can't you just pick and choose the things you need and build your own distribution? Start with perl and build your way up, as it were.

    Having a more "dynamic" Perl configuration, though, would help substantially. Compile-time configuration is such a pain.
[reply]
[d/l]
      I think the discussion is centered around the "core" BSD, so I tend to agree you shouldn't need something like (blatant example) CGI.pm in it. I would be happy if I could install "core" perl and then fetch my own modules/Bundles. I also don't think you should have to require perl to have BSD, but that's another story.

      I would install a "basic" perl in my laptop for example, where I have only a 2GIG drive and every M is precious. I would also expect a default server install of any distribution to include TONS of modules (but not the client install), and if CPAN was a little (lot?) "cleaner", I would expect hosting companies to include it all.

      tstock
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      Even in the age of 160GB disk drives, very few of them are shipped from the manufacturer with BSD on them -- they have to be loaded from some media or another. The most common current choice is a CD-ROM which is fixed at ~600MB.

      Having spend a small chunk of my career assembling OS distributions for dissemination: I can tell you that having an entire, working OS on the smallest whole-number of CD's possible is important. And on a 600MB CD, 26MB for a scripting language is a pretty hefty footprint.

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        But they aren't removing it fro the CD, they're just removing it from the core, right?

        Update: Just sort of curious - what part of that question was deserving of somebody's -- ?

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        The Perl5 installation I have here, complete with modules, is 20MB. A more heavily loaded version I also use is 26MB. How can anyone claim in the age of 160GB hard drives that this is somehow too large?

      Grr. (This is one of my pet peeves.)

      Many people run free Unixlikes on old hardware, as low volume mail or web servers, firewalls, and so on. On a 200MB hard drive, 20MB is too large, especially when /var/log fills rapidly (as it does on firewalls or net servers). Not everyone runs, or can afford, an even remotely new machine.

      --
      :wq

[reply]
      Mark is more worried about maitainence. Perl build system is far from perfect and it doesn't fit the FreeBSD build mechanism when, say, you want to build a complete FreeBSD release for Alpha on your i386 box. He says "bloat" and means not only bytes on the disks but also work needed by maintainer (himself) to harness the perl inside FreeBSD.
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