On Sat, Oct 10, 2026 at 04:23:17PM +0200, [email protected] wrote: > > It may be that demanding the requirements for an embedded Perl interpreter > > is not onerous but we could check why some distributions didn't have these > > dependencies installed by default. > > It is not our job, I think. Users are supposed to install the > dependencies. libperl is such a dependency for a normally functionning > ctexi2any command, users should install libperl. I surmise that it is > never complicated, if someone installs from source, libperl will be > there, if not, there will be a package already present to install > libperl. Embedding a Perl interpreter is not common, but texi2any > cannot be the only software embedding a Perl interpreter.
It's obvious to me that adding dependencies makes the program worse for users. Users in the past have found Texinfo to have a low amount of dependencies when compared with other programs and have found this valuable. Texinfo is often considered basic system software (for example, being installed as part of "Linux From Scratch" (*)). (*) https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/development/chapter08/chapter08.html_ Adding more dependencies does make it harder for casual users who want to build from source and potentially creates problems for distributions, especially for core system software. I've checked with the current master branch, after uninstalling "libperl-dev", "configure", "make" and "make check" complete successfully, so I am happy with the current state of affairs. > And advanced users who want a command without libperl can manage to > have texistatic compiled and install the program as texi2any. Maybe > with more documentation, but until now this was not something we pushed > forward (I actually almost decided to remove completly texistatic, > I only kept it because it is handy to find missing replacement functions > for functions calling Perl functions from C when compiling). Yes it seems worth keeping as it would be useful for when ctexi2any becomes the default implementation (I assume this would be after a future release, not for the next release).
