the licence

[Greg Hudson ghudson@MIT.EDU]

lutherh@infinet.com (Luther Huffman, Jr.) writes:
> And the intent of the Plan 9 people is to provide source code to
> those who are interested. They've done a tremendous job at this,
> second to no one.

Would you like to qualify that statement?  I won't touch Plan 9
because there are plenty of operating systems with freely
redistributable source code for me to spend me time working on.

> The Perl configure script pure and simply won't run under Plan 9.

Perhaps this is simply a cost of Plan 9's attitude towards standards
conformance, rather than about Perl?  (Perl does have one of the
world's worst build procedures, but "its configure script doesn't run
under Plan 9" is not an argument against it, any more than "its
configure script doesn't run under DOS".)

(When I note that this is a cost of Plan 9's attitude towards
standards conformance, I do not mean to imply that there aren't also
benefits to that attitude.)

> Even though I'll have to completely rewrite the code generator and
> cross-compile from an entirely different platform because it
> bootstraps itself, the overall effort is much easier than the Perl
> interpreter.

If you can rewrite a code generator in less time than you can throw
out a set of makefiles for a smallish source tree and rewrite some
simple ones to replace them, then there's something wrong, and it's
not with Perl.

> Trying to create one distribution that can compile on all platforms
> escalates the complexity to the point that the code is unmanageable.

Certainly, which is why my software distributions won't support
nonstandard platforms which no one uses, like Plan 9.  (They will,
however, use Autoconf to support reasonable Unix platforms, and they
will remain quite manageable as a result.)