On Wed, 2021-01-13 at 13:31 -0500, John Snow wrote: > On 1/13/21 5:09 AM, Gerd Hoffmann wrote: > > > I don't like Perl really, but there's a chicken-and-egg problem between > > > detecting Python and using it to print the configure help script. For > > > configure-time tasks, Perl has the advantage that "#! /usr/bin/env perl" > > > just works. > > > > Assuming perl is actually installed, the world seems to shift to python. > > On a minimal fedora install python is present but perl is not ... > > > > On the other hand git depends on perl, so it is probably pretty hard to > > find a developer workstation without perl installed, so maybe that > > doesn't matter much for the time being. > > I agree that it doesn't matter much right now, Though I don't always > have git installed in containers when I am doing builds. It will become > more common to encounter environments that are missing "obvious" > dependencies.
Note that Fedora has a git-core package that doesn't depend on Perl while still providing more than enough git for something like a CI build job. As a data point, the libvirt project has made it an explicit goal[1] to remove all usage of Perl in favor of Python. We're not quite there yet, but at this point there are only a very tiny handful of Perl scripts remaining in the repository. [1] https://libvirt.org/strategy.html -- Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization
