[Mageia-dev] [Mageia-discuss] About Mandriva tools future : Host Mandriva tools on github

[Thierry Vignaud]

On 1 October 2010 12:38, Fabrice Facorat <fabrice.facorat at gmail.com> wrote:
> As we know, one of the Mandriva strenght are the Mandriva tools,
> however Mandriva tools have some issues :
> - they are written in perl. Sorry for perl dev, but I do still think
> that perl is harder to understand than C-like based syntax langages.

That's your point of view. Every programmer will have its own POV.
Thus this is a void argument.

I think an higher language makes the entry barrier smaller for new programmers:
- real algorithms are not in hidden/drown malloc/free spagetti
- no memory bugs
- no security issues b/c of poorly thinked/coded memory management

What's more, with ugtk2 & mygtk2 it's easy to express a complex GUI
with a compact
& powerfull dialect which would need 10 times more code to do in C

> However we must admit that we are not going to rewrite all the
> Mandriva tools ;-) However better documentation ( PerlDoc tags ) could
> help a little.

More doc would be better indeed.

> - Mandriva tools are not used by others distributions ( except
> PCLinuxOS, United Linux, and ... Mageia ) and so have few external
> contributions : They notably lack visibility.

void argument: SUSE tools (yast, ...) are only used on SUSE, and the like

> I do think also that Mandriva will have to use its ressources in an
> efficient way.

In the hand, some users will think about us as just as rh or debian,
just packaged by themselves.
We would just remove what makes us different, loosing users.

> 5. Junior tasks contributions. I noticed while visiting the
> LibreOffice website. They have junior task for people willing to
> contribute to the codebase, and most of theses junior tasks consist to
> improve code clarity, fix comments. I guess that the same thing could
> be done with Mandriva tools, notably adding perldoc tags/comments.

Indeed. People can start by looking at existing bug reports and dig in code.