Hi,

On 10 November 2014 19:38, Peter Wu <peter_at_lekensteyn.nl> wrote:
> On Monday 10 November 2014 17:02:28 Tor Arntsen wrote:
>> IPC::Run is not part of the AIX perl core, unfortunately.
>
> I see,ftp://public.dhe.ibm.com/aix/freeSoftware/aixtoolbox/SPECS/perl-5.6.1-4.spec

That is an old package for an old version of AIX 5.1, from the AIX
Toolbox (free and oss software prepared by IBM).
There are newer ones, but in any case IPC::Run isn't part of that old
one either as far as I can tell (if it was, it would
be on our older 5.1 systems, and it isn't).

[..]
> IPC::Run already exists and solves the problem. Can you even consider

But which problem does it solve? Is it really necessary or important
to replace something universal with something that is not? I can write
anything I want and then say 'it exists'. But that doesn't make it so,
not really.

> installing this single module? Otherwise it has to be replaced by plain
> ol' fork/exec/open/dup/..., introducing bugs that might have been solved
> in IPC::Run a few yers ago. Now this is actually more "complex" than
> pulling the module from CPAN.

I don't think you appreciate the difference between an individual and
the enterprise. On our in-house computers, _nothing_ gets installed
as individual files, not even from CPAN. And our customers are on
another strictness level altogether. They're not even connected to the
internet - only to their internal LAN or VPN setups.

Of course using fork/exec/open etc. can introduce bugs, but that's
hardly a new problem - it's been done and implemented for decades by
now.

> I do not know where your customer gets their packages from, but they
> could try to request their distributor for inclusion of IPC::Run. Would
> that be possible?

For AIX that distributor would be IBM.. and yes, obviously anything
distributed by IBM is acceptable for our AIX customers, including the
IBM Toolbox.

But there are other systems. I don't have IPC::Run on the Solaris 10.x
systems as far as I can tell (it does have Text::ParseWords though).
Now, those are not only old but also a bit limited systems - libcurl
doesn't build and test without access to 3party software, but at least
all of that is managed by the package system on the machine.
Then there are SGI systems. The ones I have in-house are currently off
for maintenance so I can't check them but I have doubts about IPC::Run
on those as well.

What about other systems? libcurl builds and (mostly) tests on nearly
30 differnt operating systems (lumping all Linux distros into one, and
all Solaris versions into one - hardly fair, in the latter case). I
for one prefer to be very conservative with respect to the build and
test environment requirements, and only change when there is really no
other option. I still want that Python change I mentioned reversed, so
that more tests can run on more systems.

Best regards,
-Tor
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Received on 2014-11-11