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

From: "Eric S. Raymond" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2012 00:18:09 -0500

Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy <[email-masked]>:
> These may apply to other languages as well. Where do we draw a line?

I'm in favor of the general policy of avoiding scripting languages
other than the top three most widely deployed.  At the moment that
means shell, Python, Perl; on present trends, in a few years Perl
(dropping in popularity) might be passed by Ruby on the way up.

Or, to put it another way, I'm *not* actually arguing that we ought
to encourage extension commands in Guile or Haskell or whatever else
the in-language-of-the-week is.  It would be bad for maintainability 
to fragment git's codebase that way.

What I'm arguing is that the tradeoffs within the group {C, shell, Perl,
Python} have changed in ways that favor Python as it has become more
stable and widely deployed.  So instead of grudgingly allowing a few
Python extensions in through a back door we ought to be encouraging
more use of it.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>