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From: Jim Pryor <lists+alpine-devel@jimpryor.net>
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Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Understanding alpine-setup
Date: Mon, 05 Mar 2012 09:57:12 -0500

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012, at 03:21 PM, Natanael Copa wrote:
> I think it has been mentioned in IRC some time that it would have been
> nice to integrate the setup-* scripts with ACF better. After all they
> do partially same job.
>  
> > Lua *is* a terrific and small-footprint language to use if something
> > stronger than ash is needed. But to my novice eyes the existing
> > scripts already look like a pretty good system.
> 
> Ok, thanks for this feedback. Very nice to hear this from someone who
> have read the code and actually understands it :)
> 
> Yes, it does the job. We could improve the framework (I cloned some of
> the functions from the openbsd installer functions and used them in
> setup-vs-guest script:
> 
> http://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/tree/main/util-vserver/setup-vs-guest
> 
> But while working on all those scripts I have various times thought
> that the shell things are a bit clumsy, and I miss arrays/hashtables.
> Specially for things like setup-apkrepos, setup-interfaces and
> setup-disk. I already have a lua moule in progress for parsing /sys and
> fishing out disk and partition info in convenient data structures. Bash
> is way to big be considered (it doesnt help that its slow either).
> 
> I must admit that using shell if possible is a good thing. I just feel
> that we are at the limit where something stronger is wanted.

Hi Natanael, thanks for the explanations. I haven't yet gotten to know
ACF, so have no appreciation of what better integration with that
framework might call for.

For things like arrays/hashtables, though, mightn't awk suffice? It's
not sh, but it is still part of BusyBox.

I'm not at all anti-Lua; I've written a number of Lua libraries. And I'm
just beginning to learn your system, so can at best dimly understand the
pressures you feel. But I've always liked lightweight solutions, that's
what draws me to your distro. So I just thought I'd ask and try to
understand this better.
-- 
Jim Pryor
jim@jimpryor.net



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