Re^2: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl

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.

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Re: Re^2: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl by tstock (Curate) on May 11, 2002 at 06:49 UTC
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	[reply]
Re: Re^2: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl by clintp (Curate) on May 11, 2002 at 14:28 UTC
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.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re^3: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl by ehdonhon (Curate) on May 11, 2002 at 14:54 UTC
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 -- ?	[reply]
Re(3): BSD Says "Bye" To Perl by FoxtrotUniform (Prior) on May 11, 2002 at 23:39 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? 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]
Re: Re^2: BSD Says "Bye" To Perl by kappa (Chaplain) on May 12, 2002 at 09:22 UTC
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.	[reply]