Re: [MacPerl] We need more evangelism...

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 01.21 -0400 1998.07.19, Vicki Brown wrote:
>At 15:36 -0800 7/18/98, Chris Nandor wrote:
>>
>>Second, you can be as cynical as you want, but Mac OS X will be good, or
>>the Mac is dead except in niche markets.  I am betting on the former, in
>>large part because I am confident in the technoligies, architecture, and
>>people putting it together.  But that is for another discussion.  :-)
>
>Oh, you misunderstand.  I'm sure it will be good.  I'm not sure it will be
>visibly Unix to those who want a Unix piece.  I'm not convinced that GNUish
>tools, Perl, etc will just build.

Well, if my conversations with people on #perl (IRC) are any indication,
Unix people will be very happy with Mac OS X (from what we know about it
now).  Chip Salzenberg expressed strong interest in it, for example.  Tom
Christiansen had nothing bad to say about it.  :-)

So far, all reports are that GNUish tools _do_ just build.  Even Mozilla
built "out of the box"; that is, an Apple guy wrote a Yellow Box front end
to it, and made just a couple of changes to the code base to get it to run.
>From all indications, it all just works.


>Of course, the folks at the Rainbow Fruit Company have access to
>everything.  I'm sure perl will be included with the developer release of
>Mac "whatever it's called" OS.  Wether you'll have to pay a lot for that
>developer release, whether you can build the next version, that I don't
>know.

At WWDC, they seemed to say that these tools would be available, maybe as
an optional install.  Even if not, so what?  This is Unix.  All you need is
one compiler and shell working, and the rest you can do yourself.  :-)


>>Yes, this is a worthwhile goal; of course, Perl will never build out of the
>>box completely from the Perl sources, because half of the MacPerl
>>distribution is Mac-specific.
>
>How about building out of the box from the Perl sources on a Mac. I'm not
>talking about cross-platform builds.

I don't follow.


>As regards the toolbox stuff, I'm not saying that the Toolbox stuff should
>be a default part of the standard distribution downloadable with the main
>part of Perl.  Heck, I don't want the Windows/Amiga/DOS/VMS stuff in that!
>I'm saying that this should be an optional piece easily downloadable ALONG
>WITH the standard distribution of perl, from the exact same site and
>directory, optional file.

At one time I think I suggested such a thing to Matthias.  I don't recall
him being too keen on it.


At 05.53 -0400 1998.07.19, Matthias Ulrich Neeracher wrote:
>The Toolbox modules are not really the problem here. However, there is another
>valid point in here: The Mac specific parts of the MacPerl distribution should
>be packageable as a separate distribution, so you should be able to simply
>drop in a new core release & recompile.

Apparently he has reconsidered, or I misremembered!  Yes, for us
SourceBuilders, this would be best.  I think it would make it a lot easier
to "help" Matthias by making it easier to hack MacPerl, as well as making
MacPerl involved in new releases (maintenance and development) during their
development, and making new binaries if MacPerl available within a day or
two of new releases.

JAMPH,

--
Chris Nandor          mailto:pudge@pobox.com         http://pudge.net/
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