00:19 <braewoods> it only is useful for people using crux as a gateway router AND still using DSL

00:20 <braewoods> it's probably best considered an opt or contrib package at this point due to how infrequently it would be useful

00:21 <braewoods> ah it's already opt

00:35 <beerman> yeah its not in core, and i doubt anybody has the usecase for that with the iso

00:51 <jaeger> I personally haven't had use for it in many years

13:35 <farkuhar> braewoods, re: "You may be thinking of Debian. APT uses Perl extensively." Actually I was thinking of OpenBSD. Take a look at how many of their ports infrastructure scripts are written in Perl: https://github.com/openbsd/ports/tree/master/infrastructure/bin

17:37 <SiFuh> I should learn Perl

17:50 <farkuhar> SiFuh: it looks like Perl was rather popular among the first generation of CRUX developers. They left behind clues of their scripting language preferences in the prt-utils scripts and the TODO files in the source tree.

17:53 <farkuhar> Also there's the famous reply from OpenBSD's Marc Espie, calling Perl "a great compromise back in the day [he] chose it to replace pkg_add": https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=159041121804486&w=2

17:57 <SiFuh> Yeah, I remember that

18:00 <braewoods> unfortunately perl is a bit of a hard sell today.

18:08 <dlcusa> Wall's own "Pathologically Eclectic Rubish Lister" has always been apt (https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3394)

18:14 <farkuhar> braewoods: such a hard sell that you have people trying to yank it out of the OpenBSD minimal installation. Meanwhile the language that Espie said "would kind of work", never gets much criticism beyond that it's harder to read. Here for example is a line-by-line comparison tool written in awk: https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/1668424

18:16 <braewoods> perl is better than awk for more serious work.

18:17 <braewoods> awk and shell were never really intended to be comparable to a more serious language like C

18:17 <braewoods> just was thinking Perl is hard to convince people to learn today

18:22 <farkuhar> Espie did make your first point (about the serious work that a replacement for pkg_add would have to do). But once someone has mastered awk in all the domains where it makes sense, the transition to Perl for other applications is much more direct than the transition to a language like C.

18:34 <farkuhar> The ncomm snippet doesn't give any background, but I learned that it was written for gateway routers running OpenWRT. Given the limited storage on such devices, awk was the only scripting language they could assume would be available on every installation.

20:22 <groovy2shoes> Perl is the only scripting language i've ever gotten a segfault in

20:30 <braewoods> Any language can segfault, especially if you're using poorly written C extensinos.

20:49 <groovy2shoes> this was raw Perl. iirc i tried to deref a scalar, thinking it was a ref to a hash. but it was a decade ago. it really hit me then that i was dealing with a fully untyped language rather than a "dynamically typed" one.

20:52 <braewoods> I see. It's possibly better now.

20:52 <braewoods> I looked at "modern perl" before.

20:53 <braewoods> Just that if I were to design integration with a scripting language today, I'm not sure Perl would be a good choice.

21:06 <groovy2shoes> hard to beat Lua when it comes to integration. but Perl is stronger standalone.