On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 06:42:45PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> [ On Thursday, May 30, 2002 at 23:43:06 (+0200), Alistair Crooks wrote: ]
> > Forcing everyone to have Perl installed on a build machine is
> > a huge cost.
> 
> You still have not answered my question as to how you measure this cost.
> I don't see it to be huge at all, especially not when compared to the
> overall convenience offered by pkgsrc.

[Normally, I would send this type of mail to the respondent alone,
but Greg has chosen to play all of this out on the mailing list.
So be it. - agc]

I asked why people should have to bear the cost of your aesthetics,
you avoided the question, and posed another. Ignoring your logic
twist for a moment, which I consider discourteous, some upfront
costs are as follows:

8481.509u 937.417s 3:06:00.91 84.3%     0+0k 89617+56018io 14471pf+0w

which is the time taken to build perl on an ss2, hardware and OS
configured as follows:

[12:04:48] agc@nbsparc1 ...pkgsrc/lang/perl5 22 > dmesg
NetBSD 1.5.2 (GENERIC) #0: Wed Aug 22 04:33:09 CST 2001
    toor@proxima:/usr/src/sys/arch/sparc/compile/GENERIC
total memory = 36732 KB
avail memory = 32504 KB
using 128 buffers containing 512 KB of memory
bootpath: /sbus0/esp@0,800000/sd@3,0
mainbus0 (root): SUNW,Sun 4/75
cpu0 at mainbus0: cache chip bug; trap page uncached: CY7C601 @ 40 MHz, L64814 FPU
cpu0: 64K byte write-through, 32 bytes/line, hw flush: cache enabled
...

It also does not include the time taken to download the Perl
distfile, install Perl, or the disk space used by Perl:

[12:21:22] agc@nbsparc1 ...pkgsrc/lang/perl5 24 > pkg_info -qs perl
18286936

and

[12:25:24] agc@nbsparc1 ...pkgsrc/lang/perl5 26 > du -sk work.nbsparc1/
30156   work.nbsparc1/

So, under your dictation, someone wanting to install pkgsrc/security/sudo
on an otherwise empty ss2 would have to install Perl first, and be
forced to use up 18 MB for the installed package, 30 MB for building,
and over 3 hours of time, always assuming that the Perl distfile
is available.

Now you can laugh that off, say it's immaterial, make references
to C++ compilers, say that people will need Perl sometime anyway,
attempt to dictate the direction for pkgsrc, and just generally
avoid the question, but, to me and to most of the people who have
a say in where pkgsrc goes, that is a huge cost.

You have ignored people who have older or slower architectures.

You have ignored people who have some of the smaller architectures,
which are tight on disk space.

Frankly, I think they deserve more from you than to be brushed aside
as if they don't matter.

Alistair