On 12/18/10 3:24 PM, Sean wrote:
>
>>
>> Or, you might move to java for a more self-contained, OS/distribution
>> independent way of doing things.
>>
> Why Perl? Because writing/maintaining 20,000 lines of terse Perl code is
> manageable, whereas the equivalent 200,000+ in Java ruled itself out at
> the very beginning, (even at a time when I knew some Java but no Perl).
> A practical decision I clap myself on the back for every single day
> despite knowing that had I gone with Java (and this project fallen over
> long ago) I could now be getting big quids from some corporate developer
> who needs a team of new Java graduates overseen.....(hmmmmm or was it
> the right decision?).....
Starting from scratch now or recently, it would be hard to argue maintainability
for perl vs. java, but back in java 1.4 days or before, it was probably the
right choice. But java sort of isolates you from changes in the rest of the
platform. And groovy eliminates most of the unnecessary verbosity if you don't
mind a bit of a performance hit.
> Core Perl stability? I agree.
>
> Why BerkeleyDB? I dont know of an embedded-db equivalent that will store
> 'any and every data exactly as is'.
I'd think sqlite first - these days anyway. BerkelyDB had bugs in growing
existing items way to long for me to ever trust it again. Or use a server
instead of embedding anything. Either postgresql or mysql are fairly
trouble-free although they've had their own version-specific issues. Or if you
need scale, look at something like riak.
> Originally on RH8 for 3/4 years, the first attempt to port onto a brand
> new release of FC4 broke everywhere. The second attempt a year or so
> later went better and remains. In the meantime FC support philosophy has
> tightened/altered to the point where I simply must abandon it. I believe
> it has become just an 'alpha test ground' for RHEL. Reminds me of the
> painful Dos saga -- the first version to work properly (Dos-6) was just
> about irrelevant when finally released. So yes, CentOS has come into my
> sights ... (and I'm a bit long in the tooth to tiptoe around as you may
> have gathered!).
If you had moved to Centos3 as the first step, you could have run that with
nothing more drastic than a periodic 'yum update' for years, then jumped to
Centos5 with no rush to change again even now.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com