Re: dchanges, architecture component, parseable filenames

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

>>>>> "B" == Bruce Perens <bruce@Pixar.com> writes:

Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but I've been wondering about this
for a while, and your discussion brought it up again.

Do you think python is flexible enough to be an effective replacement
for perl?  I just started looking at the docs, and it looks quite
impressive, but it's hard to get a feel for how easy/hard python might
make some of the complicated grepping/regexp/file manipulation stuff
that perl does well (even if in an ugly manner).  Also, is python
comparable in speed?

I have had the experience before of jumping into a new language that
looked really interesting, but having it turn out that while the
language *was* really interesting, it didn't quite have all the tools
I needed, or made it too awkward to say what I wanted...

>> to move to python for the next major version.  I tried perl for my
>> latest version of dpkg-ftp and didn't like it.

B> I am very tempted to re-write Perl scripts in Python whenever I
B> have to work on them. It's annoying to have to add
B> _yet_another_language_, but Perl grosses me out sometimes.

B> The Python distribution isn't larger than perl, is it? Perl 5
B> carries all of the same extra baggage as Python.

>> I am also happy to help implement the ftpsite side of things as
>> well (again in python).

Back to your regularly scheduled program...

Thanks
--
Rob