Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mstar!mstar.morningstar.com!bob From: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl Subject: Re: Standard Distribution Message-ID: Date: 5 Feb 91 16:17:29 GMT References: <893@ticnj.UUCP> <1991Feb05.111212.12131@convex.com> Sender: usenet@MorningStar.COM (USENET Administrator) Reply-To: bob@MorningStar.Com (Bob Sutterfield) Organization: Morning Star Technologies Lines: 23 In-Reply-To: tchrist@convex.COM's message of 5 Feb 91 11:12:12 GMT This is the age-old problem of technology adoption, and it hits in every area, not just sysadm tools. For example, we ship documentation to our customers as *roff source, which means I must contort my poor aching brain into writing in *roff, even though LaTeX is so much more expressive and would yield many more lines of better-quality documentation per man-hour of writing time. Why ship *roff source? Because our customers must be able to print it or browse it on-line themselves, and not all have *TeX (to make paper) and Emacs (to use the embedded Info browser). To pick another example, our support guy (an Emacs user from way back) forced himself to learn ed, ex, and vi, because he often dials into customer sites to fix their broken installations of our products, and not all of them can be counted upon to have Emacs installed. Perl faces the same slow migration problem. To really mangle some metaphors, there are chickens and eggs involved as well as critical masses to worry about. Our company isn't as fortunate in this regard as Convex, where they define a single platform and must support only that one target, because our products run on dozens of platforms of widely varying pedigree. Hopefully, we can expect modern tools (e.g. perl, Emacs, *TeX, expect) to begin appearing on enough of our target systems to make using them worthwhile. Until then, we're forced to use what's available on the least of them.