On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Andy Dougherty wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Nathan V. Patwardhan wrote:
>
> > I don't think that the documentation should be removed from the core
> > distribution, BUT I do think that there should be an "easter egg" that
> > allows people to build a Perl distribution without documentation or
> > whatever else they choose. There have been times that I've
> > wanted/needed to build a "tinyperl" (even smaller than "miniperl" :-) )
> > and I've had to hack things significantly to Make It So.
>
> [This is not a stdlib issue. Issues about building perl should go to
> perl6-build. Issues about redistributing such an incomplete installation
> should probably go to perl6-licensing. Please adjust followups
> appropriately.]
>
> The number of possible permutations of "whatever else they choose" is
> extremely large. I can understand the desire to build a tiny perl
> targetted for a specific need, but I also understand there can be very
> very many different specific needs, and hence there is no single
> "tinyperl".
>
> Nevertheless, much of the necessary infrastructure is currently available
> in perl5 by fiddling with Configure command line options or config.sh.
> (e.g. you can omit all socket functions but keep SysV ipc.) There are,
> however, no pre-supplied tools or makefile targets to make it easy to
> build a particular targetted "tinyperl".
FWIW, with current perl's I can (and often do) a build with a library
collection but trimmed down to have no manpages. Though my build script
is not handy to me right now, if memory serves me correctly, I use:
sh Configure -Uman1dir -Uman3dir -Dprefix=/my/weird/path -des
after that builds and test ok the `make install` step is trimmed down
quite a bit (we usually have the /usr/local build installed with the
man pages though).
Peter Prymmer
