perl and other "non-standard" commands

[David Elliott]

In article <13432 at ut-emx.UUCP> chpf127 at ut-emx.UUCP (John W. Eaton) writes:
>In article dce at Solbourne.COM (David Elliott) writes:
>> I am working on a project right now that has to run on SunOS 4.0 as
>> distributed.  I can't assume that the customer will have perl, GNU
>> awk, or even nawk, even though any of these would make my project
>> significantly easier.  When Sun decides to make these standard (soon
>> for nawk, who knows for the others), then I'll be able to use them.
>
>Well, I don't get it.  If GNU awk would make things easier, why not
>distribute it with your product?  You don't have to wait for Sun to do
>it for you.

I said SunOS 4.0, not SunOS 4.0 on a Sun 4/110 or SunOS 4.0 on a Sun
3/50.  To distribute any binary with my product would require me to
ship two copies, three if I need to handle a Sun 386 someday.

Since we make a Sun4-compatible system, shipping a Sun 4 version
would be fairly easily (of course, I would have to stick my copy
of GNU awk down in /usr/lib/<myprojectdirectory>), but that doesn't
work for the other systems.

>> Certainly, if you're going to write software that works on a specific
>> set of systems that you can control the contents of, use perl, GNU
>> awk, and anything else you can get your hands on to do a better job.
>
>Didn't you just say that your target was a specific system/OS?  GNU
>awk is not universal, but it is *free*.  Just distribute it.

No, I said it was for a specific OS.  What I meant was that if I have
control over all of the machines (specific machines, not class of
machines), I can be sure to have everything I need.

Finally, "just distribute it" is not always a reasonable answer.  For
the Department of Chemical Engineering, it may be a simple choice.
For Solbourne Computer, Inc., it's not that simple.  Distributing
more software, especially in an age where there are still computer
systems that have disks not quite big enough to handle a full Unix
and still have adequate user space, takes some thought and action.

Just because something is free doesn't mean it's easy to add to a
product.

-- 
David Elliott		dce at Solbourne.COM
			...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce