On 18/04/25 23:17, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
On Thu Apr 17, 2025 at 7:23 PM BST, Simon Josefsson wrote:
I noticed that Fedora 42 was released and their docker images lack a
'awk' tool.
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.
My hobby for the past three years has been working on removing perl from
the transitive essential set.
It's very doable. I have PoC VMs where perl is not installed at all. I'm
very slowly polishing and upstreaming my changes: I've sent dozens
(hundreds?) of patches and there now are only about 40 maintscripts
where perl is directly used. Most importantly, I've already removed all
uses of perl from postrm maintscripts in bookworm. I've also written
shell-only replacements of Perl programs used in the transitive
essential set.
Once forky is open for development I may send a more public announcement
of this project.
Regards,
--
Gioele Barabucci
