Re: Python extension commands in git - request for policy change

["Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>]

Magnus Bäck <baeck@google.com>:
> While "constant traffic" probably overstates the issue, these are not
> theoretical problems. I recall at least three cases in the last year
> or so where Git has seen breakage with Solaris or Mac OS X because
> of sed or tr incompatibilities, and I don't even read this list that
> thoroughly.

This is exactly the sort of of pain experience would lead me to
expect.  

OK, this is where I assume the full Old Fart position (30-year
old-school Unix guy, author of "The Art of Unix Programming", can
remember the years before Perl and still has sh idioms in his
fingertips) and say "Get with the 21st century, people! Or at least
1990..."

As a general scripting language shell sucks *really badly* compared to
anything new-school. Performance, portability, you name it, it's a
mess.  It's not so much the shell interpreters itself that are the
portabilty problem, but (as Magnus implicitly points out) all those
userland dependencies on sed and tr and awk and even variants of
expr(!) that get dragged in the second you try to get any actual work
done.

Can we cease behaving like we're still pounding keys on 110-baud
teletypes now?  Some old-school Unix habits have persisted long past
the point that they're even remotely sane.  Shell programming at any
volume above a few lines of throwaway code is one of them - it's
*nuts* and we should *stop doing it*.

(Yes, I too still make this mistake occasionally out of ancient reflex.
But I know I shouldn't, and I always end up regretting it.)
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>