Speaking as an NMH leech-user B-), I think the NMH developers and
maintainers should get to specify what the preferred development
and build dependencies should be. (Which, of course, has no
direct bearing on a user that's obtaining pre-built binaries via
a package, like I do via Ubuntu. But it might make development,
or just building, on "limited" systems harder or impossible.)
Making use of a more modern scripting language for testing,
especially if it brings a comprehensive set of testing tools,
seems like it would be a win, if it makes it easier to create
better or more or more rigorous testing. Would we expect a
theoretical new developer to insist on using only older tools?
Bob
On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 19:01:52 -0400 Ken Hornstein <kenh@pobox.com> sez:
Sigh. This is one of those tough ones. It is nice to have a
minimum dependency set, but .... I see where you are coming
from. If we are voting I'd still rather write a simple C
program to do what we need here, but I recognize that may be a
minority view.
On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 18:02:58 -0400 David Levine <levinedl@acm.org> sez:
And it could probably handle at least some of what's in the
accessory test programs. On the other hand, using an LCD of
POSIX has advantages of portability and minimizing
dependencies.
On Sun, 20 Sep 2020 16:01:01 -0500 Eric Gillespie <epg@pretzelnet.org> sez:
If we're going to look at additional requirements imposed on
developers, I would suggest that imposition would bring far
more bang for the buck if it were a proper scripting language
we can write the tests in. This would not only have made this
test-mhical problem easier to fix, but also the other one I
fixed. As Ralph says, we just don't see a way to have derive
two different timestamp formats from a single source of truth
with the tools available to us. But with Perl or any of its
competitors, it would be trivial.