[Mageia-dev] The shiny new Control Center

[Olav Vitters]

On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 10:14:03PM +1000, Steven Tucker wrote:
> 2/ What languages should be available for writing modules? (Perl,
> C++, python and Ruby are possibilities)
> 
>         So far mcc2 has been written in Perl (even though I had
> never written a line of Perl prior to starting this) so as to make
> porting existing modules a matter of just replacing the Ui calls,
> but I do like the idea of allowing the modules to be written in more
> than 1 language to encourage more contributors who may be turned off
> by having to learn another language.
> Sticking with Perl will make mcc2 core easier, so I may do that
> initially regardless. What do you all think?? Is sticking with 1
> language preferred even if it means less contributors, or is the
> goal to attract as many module developers as possible?

MCC is also used for the installation right? IMO, suggest to really
limit the languages for the following reasons:
- The more languages used, the higher the maintenance burden
  (an MCC maintainer would have to know all of those languages)
  IMO that outweighs the benefit this has for random (one-off)
  contributors
- Depending on loads of languages means that you make it more difficult
  to make changes to those languages
  e.g. if you depend on Python,Ruby and Perl, it will mean that all of
  these packages cannot break. At the moment only Perl is the thing that
  cannot break or have incompatible language changes. Result is more
  packages to go via updates_testing.

I love Python and dislike Perl... but I don't intend to contribute. I
find the Perl used in the existing drak tools pretty difficult to read.
This doesn't have to be the case as e.g. Bugzilla (perl) is in latest
versions pretty readable (it used to be unreadable). Python also be made
unreadable if someone goes overboard with classes (over-engineered).

One benefit for going for Perl is that any new code will usually be more
buggy than being able to copy the existing code.

Suggest to figure out language is most preferred by the potential
contributors, keeping in mind how much contributions they'd likely do.
If that choice is not Perl, keep in mind that development will probably
take way more time.

-- 
Regards,
Olav