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.


In reply to Re: no more perl in BSD core by Kanji
in thread no more perl in BSD core by tstock

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