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

[Chris Nandor <pudge@pobox.com>]

At 17.57 -0400 1998.07.18, Vicki Brown wrote:
>There's no reason for anyone to mention Rhapsody at the moment.  It's still
>an unknown; it's either going to be enough like Free BSD to not pose an
>issue or it's still an unknown.  (Yes, I'm very cynical about
>Rhap^H^H^H^Hmac OS X).

First, it is irrelevant how unknown it is.  Perl runs on it.  How many
people know about QNX?

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.  :-)


>>If you try to grab the standard distribution and compile it under Mac OS,
>> it won't work.
>
>Sorry. I guess I misunderstood the meaning of the beta announcement then;
>it would never have occurred to me that Perl would have a reasonable chance
>of building out of the box for an Amiga.  Or DOS.  Or Windows, or VMS. None
>of which are Unix.

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.


>So, why are these ports part of the "standard" Perl (if that's what you're
>telling me) and not Mac? They're no more Unix variants than the Mac OS.

Because Matthias has more work to do.  :-)

>So the next (dumb) question is, if Perl can be downloaded from the CPAN and
>built without difficulty for offbeat systems like Amiga and DOS (or BeOS,
>though that has faint Unixy connections, it's still offbeat) why not Mac?
>What's missing, what am I not getting? Or, what aren't we doing, is there a
>technical reason, is it just that Matthias is only one person who is also
>trying to finish a PhD? Can we help? (Evangelism comes in many forms :-)

Matthias is not the only person to do it.  Matthias is likely the best
person to do it.  It makes no sense to do it before 5.005 is done, at this
point.  And while Matthias will do most of the heavy lifting, I am going to
help him with some things (standard modules, mostly), and if you have an
idea of how you (plural) can help him, send him an e-mail volunteering.

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.  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).

</RAMBLING>

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