Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 10/24/2012 08:56 AM, Jim Meyering wrote: >> Would anyone object to making perl a build-time prerequisite? >> I.e., would this cause serious inconvenience? > > Probably less inconvenience than a broken make -j ;)
Note that it is broken only when building from a tarball-based build in which you have modified a source file. However, with most distributions, that's precisely the use case: download tarball, unpack, apply distro-specific patches and build. >> If you're building on a system for which you do not run all of >> the perl-dependent tests, you can't be very serious about quality. > > If `make check` needs it, then it's a requirement IMHO. Depends on the definition of "need". In order to run a decent percentage of tests, perl is needed. However, it is not needed if all you care about is "make check" exiting successfully (even though all perl-using tests were skipped). > Now I do really like the idea of minimizing dependencies, > so for graceful degradation without perl, I suppose > the best approach would be to skip the .pl tests and That is already done. > `echo "warning"; touch $manpage`. Sounds good. I.e., it sounds like we want Stefano's patch, after all. As you recall, a nice side effect is that we will no longer distribute the generated man/*.1 files. Stefano, would you care to rebase your patch?
