apt-class WAS: fai next level

[Jens Ruehmkorf]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Thomas Lange wrote:

> >>>>> On Thu, 15 Nov 2001 03:22:52 +0100 (MET), Jens Ruehmkorf <ruehmkorf at informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE> said:
>
>     > Hm. I really don't see any problems with porting tools written
>     > in C to other architectures. And you have small size and speed.
>
> Perl is fast enough!

Yup, I'm wrong there, at least when it comes to text processing. When it
comes to some tasks, perl is even slightly faster than C. In some book I
read recently, Kernighan and Wall made some performance comparisons. On
Unix for a text-specific problem, fastest was perl, close after that C,
considerably after that C++ (it was a general book on programming, can't
remember the title).

> Most time of FAI is spend in extracting packages and installing them
> to the local disk, not running perl or shell scripts. And the size of
> ALL scripts in FAI is about 130k.

It's not the size of the scripts that matters. My point was: Diane could
think of using her tool in different environments as well
(debian-installer), where you don't have space for a perl itself. So iff
she thinks of offering here tool somewhere else, she could use C/C++.
Otherwise, use perl/python.

--
Jens