> However, I used to do all of my sys_admin type duties without it, and
> I still manage to survive quite well without Perl.

We're not talking about sysadmin duties - we're talking about unpaid
volunteers writing scripts to do things like install software and
build distributions.  Yes, you can do all that in Bourne Shell with
awk, sed, and expr scripts mixed in liberally.  But it's a *lot* more
work.  If we could count on having Perl in the core distribution, we
could avoid that work.

Nobody's saying you have to switch.   I don't even necessarily
recommend it, if you find that sh is sufficient to your needs and all
the gory awk and sed linkage is already wired into your spinal column.
But there are a lot of us out there who wouldn't accept a job
writing a significant program in Bourne shell at our standard
consulting rate, and I suspect that some of us are the same people
that would like to put a lot of work into making NetBSD more easily
installable.

This is on the back burner for me until the pmax port is a bit more
solid, but one of the things I'm going to embark on with the pmax port
in the fairly near future is an install script, and I'd sure like to
be able to do that with perl.  If I have to do it with sh, I'll
probably leave it for somebody else.

			       _MelloN_
--
Ted Lemon							 mellon@vix.com
+1 415 477 5045

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