Re: Re: [patch rfc 1/3] xen arch header rework.

[Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@suse.de>]

Jacob Gorm Hansen wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-10-11 at 13:54 +0200, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
> 
>> I don't think adding perl as build dependency is a big problem, almost
>> everyone has it on the machine anyway.  Try "rpm -e perl" on any linux
>> distro and watch the error message with the long list of stuff which
>> depends on perl.
> 
> Yes it's a terrible world already, lets make things worse.

Even you hate perl, it is still on almost every unix machine in the
world.  Which is the point of the paragraph above.  perl is so
established in the unix world that I wouldn't count that as extra
dependency.

> The problem with Perl is
> that quite often people tend to depend on various modules, and the poor
> (Perl-hating) user ends up spending hours fetching stuff from CPAN just
> to make the life of the (Perl-loving and lazy) developer a little bit
> easier.

That again is a matter of programming style, not the language.  It's not
my fault if other people are doing that.  The script in question doesn't.

We had such issues with python in the xen tree too btw.  One offender
was pygrub, which used to depend on a redhat/fedora-specific module.
Which was even more annoying than having to fetch stuff from CPAN.  CPAN
provides at least a simple way to find and fetch the stuff by module
name, which is much easier that guessing which of the redhat source rpms
you need ...

cheers,

  Gerd

-- 
Gerd Hoffmann <kraxel@suse.de>
http://www.suse.de/~kraxel/julika-dora.jpeg