[illumos-Developer] webrev: 278 get rid zfs of python and pyzfs dependencies

[Cyril Plisko]

On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 10:17 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> http://cr.illumos.org/view/jpj55p64/
>
> This work was done by another Nexentian.  The goal is to eliminate the
> use of Python from zfs, which was "split" into having some percentage of
> its code written in Python and the rest in C.  (Fixing this is a step
> along the road towards making python installation "optional" at Runtime.
> The other dependencies are beadm and IPS.  We're working on both of
> those as well, and not all distros will use IPS anyway.)
>
> Please provide feedback.  The timer on this expires in one week.

My personal take on this is opposite. I believe system management tools
are best coded in Python, rather than C. Maintenance is by far easier
and code is significantly smaller and clearer. Yes, it incurs additional
overhead of carrying python environment, but when you have it by design,
rather than by accident (a couple of tools here and there) it becomes
cost-effective.

I do realize people here prefer having everything in C, so my voice will
be hardly heard, still I'd rather voice my opinion -
in the modern computing environment Python should not be considered
any more optional than, say, libc.

Sounds too crazy ? Well, I thought so as well 5 years ago, when I
didn't code in Python.


-- 
Regards,
        Cyril