From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756249Ab3B0Vv6 (ORCPT ); Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:51:58 -0500 Received: from mail.linuxfoundation.org ([140.211.169.12]:56401 "EHLO mail.linuxfoundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750699Ab3B0Vv5 (ORCPT ); Wed, 27 Feb 2013 16:51:57 -0500 Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:51:55 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Rob Landley Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Al Viro , Arnd Bergmann , Cyrill Gorcunov , Dave Jones , David Howells , David Howells , Greg Kroah-Hartman , "H. Peter Anvin" , "H. Peter Anvin" , Ingo Molnar , Josh Boyer , Michal Marek , "Paul E. McKenney" , Peter Zijlstra , Rusty Russell , Sam Ravnborg , Thomas Gleixner , Vince Weaver , x86@kernel.org, Zheng Yan Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] build linux-next without perl Message-Id: <20130227135155.c04453db.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: <1361944667.957820@landley.net> References: <1361944667.957820@landley.net> X-Mailer: Sylpheed 3.0.2 (GTK+ 2.20.1; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:57:52 -0800 (PST) Rob Landley 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.)