Among the goals listed in dpkg’s roadmap, there’s the C rewrite of the remaining perl scripts provided by the dpkg binary package (dpkg-dev is not concerned, it will remain a collection of perl scripts). Of the remaining scripts, update-alternatives was the largest piece of code (~1100 lines of perl) and I started converting it to C a few weeks ago (based on preliminary work of Guillem). It’s now 2200 lines of C…
Thanks to the relatively extensive test-suite that I wrote last year, I’m relatively confident that this new update-alternatives won’t break your system. That said, it still needs some real-life usage to ensure everything is really ok (and users actively trying to break it are even better). Thus I would be glad if you could try it out ( binary package for i386 or .dsc) and report back to debian-dpkg@lists.debian.org.
The rewrite of the 2 other remaining scripts is almost completed in a branch of Guillem. Hopefully this can be our last project completed in time for Squeeze as far as dpkg goes. It would be a great achievement for people that would like to use dpkg in embedded environments and avoid perl due to its size.
Note: nobody sponsored that work. But it’s not too late 
haskell
hey, why don’t switch to haskell? it can describe complex operations and dataflows very succinctly, and it compiles to native code. a suggestion.
perl can also compile to native code. B::C
@funktree: first the rewrite is already done so I won’t redo it a second time. Then I never used haskell and dpkg is only C+perl+sh and I don’t see a good reason to introduce another language in the mix.
Your dpkg roadmap link is broken. The M in roadmap should be uppercase as well.
@Ewoud: thanks, fixed the link.