Re: Lua as a scripting language in NetBSD

[matthew sporleder <msporleder%gmail.com@localhost>]

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 5:52 PM, David Holland 
<dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 09:03:20PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
>  > Second is a new small footprint DHCP server. Lua makes a sane
>  > configuration language here with the possibility of arbitrary
>  > customisation.
>
> That's not a feature. Config formats shouldn't be Turing-complete.
>
>  > For scripts a good candidate for use is pkg_install. The current use of
>  > sh/awk/sed both requires larger bootstrap kits on !NetBSD and makes it
>  > difficult to correctly handle e.g. configuration files with spaces (XXX
>  > add PR reference here). This is not strictly a reason to move it to
>  > base, but might provide an idea for what it is useful.
>
> I'm not sure I understand this. Isn't pkg_install mostly compiled C
> code? Is the goal to rewrite it in Lua instead of C?
>

As this discussion shows, the only real answer is to include all (or
many) popular scripting languages, or none.  Look at the base install
of any popular linux, osx, or solaris these days.  Perl is the most
ubiquitous, but is being replaced by whatever (python seems popular)
as it slowly falls out of favor.

Extend awk for a more robust scripting environment or make package
management so much easier (pkgat + sysinstall improvements?) that
adding stuff into base is no longer considered an advantage.