Subject: Re: Suggestion: inclusion of the truncate(1) utility into the tree
To: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr>
From: Andrew Brown <atatat@atatdot.net>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 07/22/2000 13:06:00
>> it's not necessary, no, but it *is* becoming rather ubiquitous.
>> freebsd has it, linux has it (of course), and even solaris comes with
>> it now.  solaris 8, that is, which is one weird beast.  while far from
>> necessary for most things, it's probably one of the few things that
>> almost *anyone* will be installing.
>
>I like perl, one can quickly write powerfull scripts with it.
>However, there are some machines where I actually *don't want* to see it
>(these are machines with higth security level: user evironnement is very
>restricted, and perl allows far too many thinks :). I would be very
>annoyed if it was required for the base system to work.

it doesn't allow any more than a plain old c compiler would.  i assume
you've removed the c compiler from these machines?  and ftpd?  and
chmod?  and uudecode?  uudecode is a wonderful tool for creating
binaries on machines without a c compiler.  it seems very innocuous,
but it's not.

>Other conserns are disk and memory space (NetBSD runs on small systems, which
>are ~impossible to upgrade) and speed (I'm not sure perl would be
>that usefull on my 3/60).

perhaps not, no.

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