Hi Syd, On 15-08-30 10:02 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:
Well, I'm not pushing hard for Perl per se, but my point is that as requirements go, it's not a problem. Pretty much any system that has `make` has `perl`, too.
To be honest I feel the same way about make. I'd like to move everything to ant. It's easier for newbies to learn and understand, and it has a lot of payoffs in terms of the number of JVMs that have to get instantiated during a build process. For instance, if you call Saxon 20 times from a Makefile, you instantiate 20 JVMs; if you do it from an ant process, the same JVM is used every time. Sebastian already managed to cut a lot of time out of the build process by doing that.
Same can't be said for Saxon or Ant. (Yes, I realize that our processing chain already requires these things, and that it would not be a good idea to try to get rid of them.)
Please no. If we get rid of ant at this point, we'll be back to builds that take an hour and a half. If there were one thing guaranteed to stop me contributing to P5, it would be a move to use make and PERL more, and ant less. I think it would be madness.
My objection, BTW, is *not* with using XSLT instead of Perl. My objection, a minor one at that, is with performing the hack on the input PureODD rather than on the output DTD. But that objection is not a show-stopper, it's just a misgiving.
The resulting file would be transient and deleted at the end of the process; it would just be part of a processing chain. Cheers, Martin
I'm not impugning PERL per se, although I don't love it myself; I'm just suggesting that we keep the number of requirements in the toolchain to a minimum. We _must_ have Java and Saxon and Ant; we don't have to have PERL just to do a string-replace. I really would like to get away from any dependence on CLI stuff in favour of Ant, so that we really could have a platform-neutral build process.