Hello Florian, argh, this got stuck in my "outgoing" folder for a while, sorry.. Florian Ragwitz [2010-11-13 16:40 +0100]: > Also, I think that a user installing the `perl' package should end up > with the full content of the perl 5 distribution available. Your current > plan seems already have that covered. Confirmed, the "perl" (meta-) package should always pull provide. We aren't seeking to reduce it, but to not install it by default. > What's not entirely clear to me yet is what sort of space savings you're > looking for. Is it just dropping various modules, or are you also > planning to cut back on core features? For now I'd just like to not install modules which aren't needed by anything in a default desktop-ish install. perl-base (the "core features", I think) is only 1 MB compressed and 4.8 MB uncompressed, and we neither can nor want to remove that, since a lot of maintainer scripts or system integration scripts are written in (core) Perl. > However, the thought of having a /usr/bin/perl without all the > functionality included in a perl release doesn't seem very appealing to > me. Right, so this mainly comes down as defining what "the perl distribution" is. Every programming language comes with a set of "shipped by default" runtime library and separate packaged extensions. So if some of the modules would be split out into separate packages, it IMHO wouldn't change the principal quality of this, just that the "perl distribution" would get smaller, and there would be some more separate modules. I don't want to prescribe you as upstreams which parts should go into the "perl standard installation", just pointing out my view as a developer. It would certainly be a kind of disruption to suddenly see some modules falling out of a default perl install with the need of installing them separately now, so from that POV I do understand your concern. > For that reason I sympathise with David's suggestion of having a > /usr/bin/minimal-perl or /usr/bin/system-perl or whatever instead, and > have the base system tools use that instead of a full perl in > /usr/bin/perl. That would only be meaningful if we'd actually drop stuff from the perl builtins, which we don't plan to do (see above), right? Thanks, Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)
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