* Russ Allbery [2010-12-27 08:49 -0800]: > Luk Claes <l...@debian.org> writes: > > > I thought there were some plans to try to get rid of perl-base being > > essential, in that case only shell (or C?) is a real alternative.
We are not that far away from being able to implement this plan. One reason for this is that dpkg's perl scripts were rewritten in C. After debootstraping the minbase variant of sid, installing file-rc and removing insserv, there is not much perl left in the newly created system. The remaining perl library packages could be removed after installing debconf-english. Remaining perl scripts are: * chkdupexe from util-linux: This is short and could easily be replaced by something written in C. Alternatively, the following untested snippet could be prepended to chkdupexe: #!/bin/sh [ -x /usr/bin/perl ] && exec perl -x -- "$0" "$@" echo >&2 "Please install the package perl-base." exit 1 * debconf: cdebconf exists and there is bug #328498 about switching to cdebconf as default, blocked by four other bugs. * pam_getenv and pam-auth-update from libpam-runtime: pam_getenv is 76 lines of code. pam-auth-update is 490 lines of code and has been added after Lenny has been released. Additionally, the preinst and postrm scripts of linux-image-* are written in perl and kernel-package generates packages with perl maintainer scripts. Using debhelper to add the dependencies on perl-base for packages that need them could reduce the required effort. Doing this early would ease ensuring sane upgrade paths. > I cannot imagine this ever happening at a practical level. Not if people continue to add new perl scripts to essential and to write new preinst scripts in perl. Regards Carsten -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20101228224818.ga23...@furrball.stateful.de
