On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:57:52 -0800 (PST) Rob Landley <[email protected]> wrote:
> Before 2.6.25 building Linux never required perl. This patch series removes > the requirement from basic kernel builds (tested on i686, x86_64, arm, mips, > powerpc, sparc, sh4, and m68k). Now updated to 3.8-rc1. > > Note, this removes perl from the _build_ environment, not from the > _development_ > environment. This is approximately the same logic behind "make menuconfig" > requiring curses but "make oldconfig" not requiring curses. Including > zconf.lex.c_shipped in kconfig and then requiring perl makes no sense. > > ... > > Mostly people just copy the patches into their local projects (ala > https://github.com/rofl0r/sabotage/tree/master/KEEP ) but I'm reposting > them to linux-kernel after Gentoo considered using these patches, but didn't > because they weren't upstream: > https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=421483 Sitting here scratching head wondering why you-need-perl is a problem for anyone. That gentoo bug report provides some explanation: "perl was removed from @system". But I expect other people have different reasons. IOW, please better describe the motivation for this patchset. It'll need to be reasonably good motivation, too. Because not only do we need to patch the kernel, we also need to *maintain* its perl-freeness and fix up perlisms as they later get added by others. (Perhaps one way of doing this would be to disable perl in regular builds, so even if a developer has perl installed on his machine, his build will still fail when he invokes it. Add "PERL=/dev/null" to some build targets in some manner.) -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [email protected] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
