Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.

Markus Heidelberg
2009-01-04T03:38:03Z

Rob Landley, 04.01.2009:
> On Saturday 03 January 2009 18:37:12 Leon Woestenberg wrote:
> > My argument on thin dependencies indeed mostly holds for run-time
> > dependencies (to reduce size) but also for build dependency (to reduce
> > complexity)*.
>
> I usually just point to the gnucash 1.6 release as where this sort of thing
> leads if you ignore it long enough:
> http://lwn.net/2001/0614/
>
> These days, a more modern example is the way that after even the gentoo folks
> gave up on trying to build openoffice (and shipped prebuilt binaries of it in
> their "build everything from source code" OS), Open Office's own developers
> described that project "profoundly sick" and "stagnating" (
> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/28/0124230 ).

Now that you mention this the second time, I have to ask where you have
this information from. Since I use Gentoo, I was always able to compile
OpenOffice (version 1, 2 and now 3) myself.

At the same time, it was always possible to use prebuilt packages as an
alternative - the same way as it is possible for a few other packages
(Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, maybe more). But AFAIK compiling from
source is still the preferred method.

Markus