Hi, On Thu, 23 Aug 2007, Theodore Tso wrote: > On Thu, Aug 23, 2007 at 10:10:20AM +0100, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > > > Red herring. The proposal was not to do nothing, but rather give git > > > > a dedicated scripting language internal to it. > > > > > > That is a really neat idea. > > > > Why? Why should just _having_ a dedicated scripting language _per se_ be > > a neat idea? We do not _need_ it! We script git in bash, perl, other > > people in Python, Ruby, and even Haskell. So why should we _take away_ > > that freedom from others to script Git in whatever language they like > > most? There is no good reason. > > Users should be able to script in whatever language they want; that's > clear. However, what some people were talking about was an internal > scripting language that would be used for writing git commands, as an > alternative to an alternative future where everything gets moved to C. And that is _exactly_ where I fail to see benefits from. You only get the full power of C by using C. You only get the full power of all open source C programmers by using C. And you only get the full flexibility, speed, name-your-own-pet-peeve using C. Mind you, I use scripts a lot. I even have some projects where I git-added a script to add aliases which are so large as to fit half a terminal. But we should not _force_ people to have bash or perl when they do not plan to use it themselves. > (To accomodate those Windows users who for some silly reason refuse to > install Cygwin, bash, and perl on their Windows development box. :-) I have seen boxes where the administrators locked down everything. And Cygwin _does_ need to write the registry, and there is _no_ easy way to have two independent Cygwin installs on the same machine. This is where MinGW/MSys really shines. > So for those people who think an internal scripting language would be a > worthwhile way of implementing certain git commands, instead of > converting them all to C, my suggestion would be to "show us the code". > Actually create the git to LUA bindings, and then show how easily it > would be to rewrite a bunch of the existing git commands which are > currently implemented in shell in LUA instead. And force everybody who wants to contribute to _those_ parts of Git to learn LUA? It is not about languages. It is about people. Choosing an obscure language automatically limits your most valuable resource: people. We saw that already with filter-branch (which saw some duplicate efforts, because one developer was not comfortable with shell; we had two different programs with different suboptimal behaviours). > But if people are just gushing over the glories of elisp and saying > things like *someone* should create a scripting language for git, it's > just going to be a waste of everyone's time. Amen, Dscho - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
