A final word.

For all you backseat drivers: this is OpenBSD.

Those who do the work get to call the shots.

I did get permission from my fellow developers to switch our pkg_* to
perl once I made a strong enough argument.

A huge part of the argument was the actual code. I did write tools that
work. I did write an infrastructure that still grows, stays coherent,
and is still fairly easy to manage.

These pkg_* are the first in the BSD world to actually support safe
updates, without needing to back up most of your system first.

Everything-in-perl was a deliberate design decision.

What do you think ? that we grow code in a vat with eyes closed ?

I've looked very closely at the neighbors, and at our distant cousins.

The neighbors manage to live on a weird mix of awk/ruby/perl/python/sh/C.
From a distance, it looks like everyone in NetBSD/FreeBSD has their own
favorite language, and is happy to reinvent a square wheel to handle
packages in their own language.

Well, my tools were written specifically to squash that, to give people
a cool enough interface that they would not need to reinvent the world.

You prefer python ? tough cookies. Perl and python are more or less
equivalent. If you know one, you can write code in the other. Or you're
less elite than you think (as a sidenote, I loathe php, yet I run a
drupal site, and I have written numerous patches for drupal).

The only important difference, for me, was that perl comes with the
base install in OpenBSD. And we made a conscious decision to keep it so.
That gives us *one* decent high-level script language.

OS and distributions are all about editorial choices. Some have given up,
and let the user wadle through hundreds of inane choice and a bazaar of
half-finished toys. OpenBSD takes some strong stances. We wanted pkg_* that
work, we got them. You don't like that they're in perl ? you can always
go elsewhere, or, if you have some real balls, write something better in
whatever language you want.

Have fun, good luck.