Re: [Monotone-devel] Contributed scripts and how to handle them...

[Stephen Leake]

CooSoft Support <address@hidden> writes:

> What I was referring to as standard Perl, was in the English sense of
> the word and not referring to an ISO standard. 

Hmm. Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/standard) gives 9
definitions of "standard". The closest here is number 6:

    "A rule or set of rules or requirements which are widely agreed upon
    or imposed by government." 

That would be "de-facto" or "industry" or "ISO" standard.

> I.e. my script will run on a basic vanilla install of Perl, what would
> be got by downloading and compiling the tar ball from www.perl.org
> with default arguments to ./configure. 

That is what I meant by "common package".

> It doesn't need extra CPAN packages, 

Ah! I had not considered this issue.

> unlike mtn-browse, and is not dependant on multi-threading (an option
> on ./configure). It's just a lot easier to use the word `standard'...
> :-)

I would say "base" Perl, similar to "base" Cygwin or Debian, as opposed
to "extended with optional packages". Yes, we don't have simple language
for that, but I've never heard "standard" used in that way. 

I would say anything in CPAN is "industry standard" Perl, but they are
optional packages for any particular Perl installation.

> What is available to a Perl script can differ quite dramatically from
> distro to distro. mtn-browse would work out of the box on Mandrake,
> likewise Debian and Ubuntu, but RedHat you would have to download
> about 10 CPAN packages. 

Ah. So the definition of "base" Perl is _not_ standard :). 

So now we have to talk about "minimal base" Perl. I guess there is "wide
agreement" on that; "download the tarball from www.perl.org, don't add
anything from CPAN", so that is a "standard". 

> Sorry for the confusion.

No problem; always good to have a polite discussion about semantics :)

> Hope this helps :-)

Yes, thanks.

-- 
-- Stephe