Zack's Kernel News

Perl Dependencies

Rob Landley has not had much luck with his patches to remove Perl as a kernel build dependency. As he pointed out recently, the 2.6.25 Linux kernel added some Perl scripts to the build system. This means that anyone wanting to compile Linux since version 2.6.25, would have to have Perl installed on their system. Before the 2.6.25 kernel, that was never required. Rob's patches replaced the Perl scripts with simple Unix shell scripts. But – as he said in his email – he's posted these same patches over and over, and they've never been picked up.

Andrew Morton wrote back, saying he didn't see why a Perl dependency would be a problem for anyone. He pointed out that any decision to remove Perl dependencies would also necessarily include a commitment to remove all *future* Perl dependencies, which might take a bit of work and diligence. He asked what Rob's overall reasoning was for these patches.

Rob replied, "it's a completely gratuitous build environment dependency, and the kernel has a history of removing those." He also added that his shell scripts were at least as simple, if not simpler, than the Perl scripts they replaced. So, accepting his patches would not only remove the dependency, it would also simplify the kernel.

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