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

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

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.

I'm not talking about Blue Box or Yellow box or Whatevercolor box they have
these days.  I'm talking from the perspective of someone who LIKES Unix,
having worked at Apple for 11.5 years and knowing just how much the mere
thought of anyone being able to get to a Unix on a Mac scares the <insert
favorite euphemism here> out of them.

that's all :-)

<smallrant>
Then again, I've been out of the loop for 9 months; maybe they've gotten
their act together :-) (I was in the "Unix utilities" group and up until
April 97 it was unclear whether Unix would be accessible or Open Source
software would easily build and no one seemed to want to even think about
the issue. or discuss it. There are reasons I don't work there anyomre;
Steve is only one of them ;-)

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.

getting off topic. I'll stop.
</smallrant>

>Perl has built out of the box on VMS for a long time, on Windows since
>perl5.004_04.  I don't know much about Amiga.

I'm happy to hear the Windows inclusion has happened recently recent. :-)
I'm happy to believe that the Mac inclusion may only be one release behind.

>
>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.

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.

>But this will make MacPerl very easy to
>patch when patches come from p5p.  When a new perl comes out, it should be
>a simple matter to update MacPerl, as long as the changes to perl are
>Mac-compatible (which means that Mac voices would need to be more plentiful
>on p5p in the future).

I would love this.  I think a lot of us would love this.  It would bring
the Mac back into the mainstream.  I don't want to be a niche operating
system.

At the risk of getting into an argument, I'd bet there are considerably
more Mac Perl users than Amiga or BeOS users.  Talk about niche operating
systems!  It makes me feel bad when Windows is part of the "standard" Perl,
or worse, Be or Amiga, and Mac isn't, that's all.

Vicki Brown, vlb@cfcl.com               |\      _,,,---,,_
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