* Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> [250419 15:47]:
On Fri, Apr 18, 2025 at 10:17:12PM +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote:They likely lack perl, as well. Most/all awk usage in maintainer scripts could probably be replaced with perl. But, if you are in the minimizing game, perhaps you'd rather remove perl from the essential set? A substantially harder project.If the goal is a minimal container image, why use debian at all vs a distribution optimized for that purpose? Running alpine without perl is already a solved problem...
This is true for a lot of things Debian is used for. As an example: GNOME desktop users could also use Fedora, and the work of
maintaining GNOME in Debian would be saved.People like to use Debian for a lot of different reasons. Very large and very small installs are "just" usecases too. When there are enough people interested (and so on...) in it, it will happen.
Chris