[Mageia-dev] [Mageia-discuss] About Mandriva tools future : Host Mandriva tools on github

Fri Oct 1 15:14:20 CEST 2010

On 1 October 2010 12:38, Fabrice Facorat <fabrice.facorat at gmail.com> wrote:
+> As we know, one of the Mandriva strenght are the Mandriva tools,
+> however Mandriva tools have some issues :
+> - they are written in perl. Sorry for perl dev, but I do still think
+> that perl is harder to understand than C-like based syntax langages.
+
+That's your point of view. Every programmer will have its own POV.
+Thus this is a void argument.
+
+I think an higher language makes the entry barrier smaller for new programmers:
+- real algorithms are not in hidden/drown malloc/free spagetti
+- no memory bugs
+- no security issues b/c of poorly thinked/coded memory management
+
+What's more, with ugtk2 & mygtk2 it's easy to express a complex GUI
+with a compact
+& powerfull dialect which would need 10 times more code to do in C
+
+> However we must admit that we are not going to rewrite all the
+> Mandriva tools ;-) However better documentation ( PerlDoc tags ) could
+> help a little.
+
+More doc would be better indeed.
+
+> - Mandriva tools are not used by others distributions ( except
+> PCLinuxOS, United Linux, and ... Mageia ) and so have few external
+> contributions : They notably lack visibility.
+
+void argument: SUSE tools (yast, ...) are only used on SUSE, and the like
+
+> I do think also that Mandriva will have to use its ressources in an
+> efficient way.
+
+In the hand, some users will think about us as just as rh or debian,
+just packaged by themselves.
+We would just remove what makes us different, loosing users.
+
+> 5. Junior tasks contributions. I noticed while visiting the
+> LibreOffice website. They have junior task for people willing to
+> contribute to the codebase, and most of theses junior tasks consist to
+> improve code clarity, fix comments. I guess that the same thing could
+> be done with Mandriva tools, notably adding perldoc tags/comments.
+
+Indeed. People can start by looking at existing bug reports and dig in code.
+