built-in scripting languages

[Andreas Kostyrka]

* Ted Lemon <mellon at fugue.com> [070122 23:21]:
> On Jan 22, 2007, at 2:49 PM, Andra? 'ruskie' Levstik wrote:
> >Personaly by default there should be none. And let the user decide what he
> >wants. For example I prefer ruby over perl, lua or python and I like using
> >bash scripts for a lot of stuff. So having lua on my system would be more
> >or less pointless as I don't use it myself.
> 
> I want to agree with this, but I'd like to point out one small problem with it: if you have an app written in one of these languages, you have to install the whole interpreter anyway.  
>  And god forbid you should have two apps, both of which are written with the same interpreter, both of which install their own (possibly conflicting) version of it.

conflicting versions of interpreters are quite seldom, at least in
Python-land. (That's perhaps because python has some community
processes that let's the developers know what will be enabled in the
next version, new keywords/syntax need normally imports from
__future__ *g*, e.g. taking a look at python 2.5 I can know what
keywords/changes will be enabled by default in 2.6)

> So in order to agree with this, we nevertheless have to talk about the problem: how do we ensure that if an end-user wants to run an app written in python, and another written in ruby, 
> and a third written in python, that they get exactly two interpreters installed on their Neo, and not three?

Python usually is pretty well back-wards compatible. In Unix-practice
one just distributes the scripts/modules and uses the python that is
installed on the box. Guess the same thing applies more or less to
Ruby, albeit it's not yet standard on that many distributions as Python.

> There are a couple of ways to solve this problem, but the point is that if you just leave it open and let nobody solve it, you may wind up with an unpalatable result for the end-user.  
>  And the result for the end-user is important - if the Neo is only useful to geeks, it can't accomplish its stated goals.
ipkg install python => you get the standard python and that's it.

Andreas