Re: Legacy scripts

On Mon, Sep 20, 1999 at 09:35:01AM -0400, Rich Bowen wrote:
> I looked through the "legacy" scripts, and found very few that seemed to
> be worthwhile keeping around. There were also a number that I simply did
> not understand, and so cannot comment inteligently on. Are they being
> kept simply because the CPAN is C, or is there some historical reason -
> perhaps a historical reason that would be better served by giving them
> to history.perl.com rather than mirroring them on hundreds of sites
> around the globe?

    Some have suggested that the legacy scripts should remain for
historical reasons.  I can't say that I concur, but IIRC, some
serious Perl old-timers had strong feelings that those scripts
shouldn't be removed.

> The "DATE and TIME conversion/manipulation" section, for example, were
> all obsoleted by the various Time::* and Date::* modules. They are
> interesting, because they show how one might accomplish these same
> things by hand, but they are not particularly useful, because one is
> unlikely to need to accomplish them by hand.
> 
> Ditto for the Database section.
> 
> I think that it would be a worthwhile exercise to go through all of them
> and figure out which ones were worth keeping, and move them to the main
> scripts archive. And the ones that were deemed not worth keeping,
> perhaps it would be worthwhile to demonstrate an alternative way of
> doing the same thing, and present the old way and the new way together
> somehow, with some commentary of why the old way seemed like a good idea
> at the time - apparently, mostly because we were still using Perl 4 at
> the time.

    I think it would be terrific if people would adopt the good legacy
scripts and sponsor them in the new scripts area.  As to the rest of
your proposal, I encourage you to be more specific.

    Peace,
* Kurt Starsinic ([email protected]) --------- Technical Specialist *
|       `People keep pretending they can make things deeply                 |
|        hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't.        |
|        Everything is deeply intertwingled.' -- Ted Nelson                 |
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