On 2025-04-28 15:57 +0100, Jonathan Dowland wrote: > "apt-cache show perl" lists it as "Build-Essential: yes". But why? It's > not in the transitive dependencies of build-essential,
It is, dpkg-dev depends on perl:any. > nor /usr/share/doc/build-essential/list, and I can't find that header > verbatim in Perl's debian/control in the source, nor in the binary (I > checked perl_5.40.1-3_amd64.deb with dpkg-deb -I) The tag is coming from an FTP Master override, see http://ftp.debian.org/debian/indices/override.sid.extra.main.gz. You could argue that perl should probably not really be build-essential, but even if somebody comes along and rewrites dpkg-dev and debhelper in a different language it might be difficult to remove perl from build environments. Cheers, Sven
