From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 19947 invoked by uid 1002); 16 Apr 2003 11:02:42 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gentoo-dev-help@gentoo.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Post: List-Help: List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Id: Gentoo Linux mail X-BeenThere: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Received: (qmail 23325 invoked from network); 16 Apr 2003 11:02:41 -0000 From: "merv" To: gentoo-dev@gentoo.org Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2003 14:13:52 +0300 MIME-Version: 1.0 Reply-to: merv@spidernet.com.cy Message-ID: <3E9D6520.29433.872488C@localhost> Priority: normal X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Windows (v4.02) Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Content-description: Mail message body Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] initscripts in python X-Archives-Salt: 79d05e91-ebc2-47e0-8fde-96e6c188ffef X-Archives-Hash: c71438af8c522a6bf25453bdbd40b905 Yep, one of the things that would be hard to do would persuade many of either the *need* for this or of its advantage. To move away from pros and cons for a moment, I see a need and an advantage : [*need* is a word treated as meaning a potential *use for* something, for now, a bit elastic perhaps]: 1) [need or use:] by incorporating Python functionality (or other programming lang) into a more extensible style shell, sh becomes more widely accessibly to a number of community member who have minimal->no sh scripting ability, but who are familiar with programming of one flavour or another. I would have to agree, and say that my first impulse is to just encourage them to learn to *bash* or whatever, but everyone has their reasons. If a user was able to incorporate the functionality (but not the whole language) of a lang with which they were familiar (or their favourite lang) at build time, shell scripting would become a common language for even more people of the Gentoo family. 2)[advantage or effect:] to undertake such a re-write of the way that the shell is built would, conceivably, result in a change in the way that the community thinks of the shell. Perhaps shell extensibility (for which I mean a kind of individual user-level customisation during build) would result in the shell itself being perceived as a kind of IDE or runtime environment, as well as a way to get around and make things happen. This kind of *shell development* might act as a corollary to kernel development. If kernel development is seen as cultivating and extending the functionality and capability of the kernel, then perhaps shell development could be seen as refining and extending the adaptability and usability of the shell at the level of the individual user, providing greater choice and customisability. Would this not be a natural implementation of the kind of hyper-tweak choice-driven philosophy of Gentoo? and of course, any extensibility options to be built in at build-time could of course be ommitted (packaged as *default off*), only turned *on* by those who deliberately wanted to make use of it. It has always felt to me that the power of sh scripting was its flexibility. To extend the functionality of the sh-scripting env in this way would consolidate, in my view, the usefulness of sh-scripting by enhancing it, or at least extending it for those who wanted to make use of it. >SH-scripting is in itself already very powerfull. It's not because lots of >initscripts are bad written (because of historic reasons) that it is to >blame >on sh. You can create functions with sh. You can do so many >powerfull things >with it (no, object oriented programming it cannot, but that's not >powerfull >either :) > >http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/complexfunct.html > >Not that I dislike Python, au contraire, I like the immens easiness for >parsing XML with it, controlling databases with the DB-API... but >initscripts >don't require this possibility. > > Sven Vermeulen -- Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity. - Merv Hammer mailto: merv@spidernet.com.cy -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list