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

[John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>]

On 1/14/21 6:10 AM, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
> 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.
> 

Good to know. Another point against perl necessarily existing.

> 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
> 

It's a good long term goal, I think.

I'm biased, but:

(1) I understand Python very well
(2) I find perl difficult to work with.

I assume that long-term it will be easier to use Python instead of Perl 
for most of our precompiler scripts. Based also somewhat on everyone's 
reaction when someone suggests changes to the checkpatch script, which 
is "Oh, sure, if YOU write it ..."

--js