On Jun 24, 2009, at 3:09 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> Well, I think in our case that would be going too far. I think there
> is a very good case for keeping a few key extensions in core both as
> exemplars and to make it easy to validate the extension mechanism
> itself. There have been suggestions in the past about throwing a
> bunch of things overboard, sometimes out of a passion for neatness
> more than anything else ISTM, but there have been good arguments
> against as well, particularly in the case of the PLs, which are tied
> so closely to the backend.
Exemplars are good if they behave in the same way as non-core
extensions. So it might be good for the core to maintain contrib
extensions, although I would urge them to keep the size down quite
low, and to be very conservative about adding new extensions. Part of
the issue Perl ran into is that it was too liberal about adding new
stuff to core, especially modules with large dependency trees.
Anything in core should be kept very simple, both to avoid bloat and
to minimize the maintenance overhead for the core team.
Best,
David