Re: "Please drop perl dependency" bugs

["Brendan O'Dea" <bod@debian.org>]

On 10 November 2010 07:40, Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org> wrote:
> (background: at least #602919, #602920, #602928, #602931)
>
> On Tue, Nov 09, 2010 at 01:56:34PM +0100, Martin Pitt wrote:
>
>> in Ubuntu we are trying to get rid of Perl in the default installation
>> (that is, the full Perl, not perl-base of course); for this I'm
>> currently removing the remaining reverse dependencies.

Out of curiosity, is there a particular reason why you would like to
remove Perl?  The current perl + perl-modules packages are all of 34Mb
installed.  Are there really systems today for which that amount of
disk space is an issue and a generic distribution such as Ubuntu is
appropriate?

> Until now, the perl-base package has been provided mostly for the
> benefit of the Debian Installer and for limiting the functionality in
> the Essential:yes package set. I don't think it was ever the intention
> that end user systems would be left with just the 'perl-base' package
> by default.

This is absolutely correct: perl-base is intended to provide for the
installer and for maintainer scripts.  It was never intended to be a
"minimal Perl" except transitionally.

> Another point we need to consider is upstream relations. The
> result of this strategy is that the vast majority of users get a
> default installation with /usr/bin/perl but not the full standard
> library. Upstream has been somewhat sensitive in this area [1], and the
> plan should definitely be brought up on the perl5-porters list too.
[...]
> [1] A relatively recent related discussion can be found through
>    http://lwn.net/Articles/348084/

Right.  Pulling apart the Perl packages into separate chunks at all
was contentious with upstream and not supported, but we got by because
in general all of Perl was installed by default, excepting the docs
which we worked around the docs with a diversion.  Shipping just
perl-base by default will not go down well.

--bod

[please CC me on replies, I'm not subscribed to debian-perl]