Re: Rewrite cvsup & portupgrade in C

On Wednesday 07 July 2004 02:00 am, David O'Brien wrote:

> What bugs?  I'm not aware of any CVSup bugs -- that doesn't mean at least
> one doesn't exist, but I'd love to know what that bug is.

How's cvsup-over-IPv6 coming along?  I note that the cvsup client is at 
version "SNAP_16_1h", and presumably those weren't all feature-adds.  Note 
that I am *not* saying that cvsup is a bad program - it clearly is not.  
Neither is it perfect.

> I think that everyone that bitches about CVSup being written in Modula-3
> hasn't looked at what the language features of Modula-3 are [...]

Sadly, I'm not sure if that's even relevent.  Modula-3 is close to being a 
dead language, in my opinion.  CVSup is literally the only program I know of 
that's written in it.  There are other actively evolving languages with the 
same properties you described with developer bases several orders of 
magnitude larger than Modula-3's.

Again, I don't think that Modula-3 is a bad language, but I think it's an 
increasingly difficult language in which to maintain a vital component of 
FreeBSD release system.  Neither do I advocate C/C++ on a basis of features, 
but you have to admit that the pool of available developers would increase 
dramatically.

Put another way, what if John gets hit by a bus.  How many people are ready to 
step up and learn Modula-3 well enough to maintain and develop CVSup from 
that point on?
-- 
Kirk Strauser