Re: "Please drop perl dependency" bugs
Martin Pitt <mpitt@debian.org> writes:
> Florian Ragwitz [2010-11-13 16:40 +0100]:
>> 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?
I don't think so. If I write a Perl script using /usr/bin/perl, I expect
the complete Perl standard library to be available without having to test
for the presence of any of those modules or arrange for other modules to
be installed. The argument is that the complete standard library isn't
available, maybe the binary shouldn't be called /usr/bin/perl because at
that point it's not really Perl. Maybe it should be called something like
/usr/bin/minimal-perl.
The standard library is *part* of Perl; Perl scripts are written assuming
that the standard library is always there and available and can be used
without any further checks or arrangements, except maybe a require
directive for the minimal Perl version one is targeting.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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