Re: minimal "zero conf" build dockerfiles for fedora:latest and alpine:latest

[Andrea Bolognani <abologna@redhat.com>]

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