TL:DR I'm in the process of writing a 'long now' document packing system, built to convey my and my descendants digital family archives into 24nd century(1). Looking at IT history I see that I can't rely an most things 'being there' in the decades to come, developers come and go, communities disperse, operating systems and CPU architectures change so old binarys have to be nursed along with emulators (Things fall apart; the CentOS cannot hold...). Taking a really pessimistic view I think only ASCII(+UTF-8) and HTML made of basic paragraph, tables and hyperlinks to be so deeply embedded that future software will need to be backwards compatible (and failing that can be simply be converted to UTF-64).

So I'm looking for a minimal Perl source code distribution that someone in the after the Death of Perl (Film at 11) can compile to extend the life of my codebase without having to rewrite it.

Longer version
I'm trying to minimize dependency's by writing scripts that build a ultrabasic static HTML website accessible via webserver, filesystem (and future AI). As a simple website it can be copied to archive.org as another strand of preservation (though storing it as a .zip, the wayback machine does bad things to the underlying structure of stored websites).

I'm working on the base assumption that my descendants will be non technical folk, able to run the command line file import and site building scripts with little understanding of how they work or how to maintain them. So I have a site built from data in easily editable textfile and the Perl code to use a minimum of CPAN modules. One day Perl may fall out of use(2), on that dark day they won't be able to update the collections, but since it's all HTML everything remains accessible and easy to copy forwards

However what I can do is throw a bone to a geeky decedent (or paid developer). So I document the system and surround the import and building scrips with a test framework so they can replicate it in their own pet language. I can also help by adding minimal a Perl source code distribution (and make sure the few modules I use are written in pure Perl and work with it). So when we see the end of ARM/IBM they could go for a recompile rather than a rewrite.

PS the obvious answer is pack it in Docker or the like, which has two problems 1) Docker et al isn't stable in the 'long now' 2) I'm aiming at a demographic who are only able to run a command line (that has been written down for them), copy a file system and can't be bothered to work out how to set up Docker.

(1) this is hubris, but I know for a fact that if I do nothing everything is certain to end up in /dev/null
(2) so could Python3 (botching it's jump from 3 to 4 in the same way it botched 2 to 3), or any language could fall by the wayside. How long will COBOL hang on in banking?

submitted by /u/octobod
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