Re: felis 1.0

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

"G. Adam Stanislav" wrote:

> >The need for a dedicated program to do this escapes me... and this is
> >not in debian so you will find a slightly more uphill fight to get it
> >accepted.  The fact that the manpage demonstrates it in the context of
> >bulk emailing does not shed a particularly good light on it.
> 
> Interesting. To my mind, why would anyone want to write a perl script every
> time he needs what this program offers when there is a dedicated program
> and all you have to do is type its name.

It seems counter to the unix philosophy to me to write a dedicated
program to handle a specific task when the same thing can be
accomplished with a standard program that exists on every system
already, such as sed, perl, or even just sh.  To me, a simple one-line
sed script would be much more portable and easier to understand by other
people who might have to inherit or maintain a system.  Every good unix
sys admin is at least somewhat familiar with sed or perl, and would be
reasonably expected to be able to understand and maintain a simple
one-line program written in them.  You say "all you have to do is type
its name" which skirts the issue that the sys admin must first be
familiar with and have previously installed that program, which I must
say is a huge assumption to make in this case because it's quite obscure
compared to those standard programs.  When I think of any form of
text-processing on a unix-type system I immediately start thinking of
regular expressions and programs like grep, awk, sed, perl, etc.  I
don't go searching for a command that implements the precise task that I
desire to accomplish.

That said if you can get the required votes and "good to go" review of
your packaging then by all means feel free to contribute a new package
to cygwin.  It's certainly fine by me and I have no standing or
authority to object.  The reasoning behind its existence just seemed a
bit strange to me, is all.  

Brian