randomly bumping things to require perl 5.30 vs 5.28 requires everyone to have both installed ...

[Dr M J Carter]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 01:26:54PM -0700, Michael wrote:
> 
> On 2020-06-22, at 1:12 PM, Dr M J Carter <Martin.Carter at physics.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> > Rats: you beat me to it.  I'll restrict myself to reminiscing about
> > dylibs having allegedly been invented (by Sun?) out of embarrassment,
> > on finding hello.c was bloated, to 3MBytes iirc, by printf() dragging
> > in half the known universe at link time.
>
> Oh, it's not all that bad. Just the standard io library, the file
> buffering library, the larger startup and exit code, math library
> (because some of the formatting options required something, probably
> rounding, I have long since forgotten), error text translation
> (gotta be able to report the error numbers as human readable text,
> after all), some string library routines -- oh, right, that's ALL of
> the string library, and ... did I leave anything out?

What was brought to my attention at the time was writing on an X
screen.  As X11 was a novelty at the time, I didn't know to ask
whether xterm or direct drawing was involved, or whether stdlib (or
whatever) was playing it both ways.  (If anyone needs to correct me on
this, I pre-emptively plead bitrot in the wetware.)

PS: Apologies for blindly replying-to-all for the wrong value of all.

-- 
Dr Martin J Carter
Sysadmin to the Stars, and Old Fart in Residence
Astrophysics, University of Oxford