Re: Rewriting pg_upgrade (was Re: State of Beta 2)

On Sun, Sep 28, 2003 at 12:38:03PM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
> > On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 10:42:02PM -0300, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> > > On Sat, 27 Sep 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
> > >
> > > > Isn't Perl pretty ubiquitous on "Unix" now, though?  Except maybe
> > > > Unixware....
> > >
> > > I know that Solaris now has it included by default ...
> >
> > FWIW, FreeBSD just removed it (in the 5.x versions). Of course you can
> > still easily install it from ports.
>
> Interesting.  Why would they remove it?

I believe it was essentially because it was starting to take up a good
chunk of space in the base install and it was beginning to cause
trouble. The parts of the OS that used it depended on version X, while
the user wanted version Y, etc. So they rewrote all the perl code in the
OS to use some other language and pulled it from the base distro.
There's more info to be had in the mailling list archives, either in
freebsd-stable or freebsd-current.

Realistically, many systems will still end up with perl installed, but I
can see where dedicated database servers might well not. And it'd be a
bit of a pain if the PostgreSQL port required perl. But of course this
is just one OS.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Consultant                  jim@nasby.net
Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"