linux-kernel - Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.

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Message-Id: <865953A9-E699-45E1-A726-F3F4EE41A0C9@mirell.org>
Date:	Fri, 2 Jan 2009 04:30:06 -0600
From:	Mark Miller <mark@...ell.org>
To:	Alejandro Mery <amery@...nsde.org>
Cc:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
	Arkadiusz Miskiewicz <a.miskiewicz@...il.com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Rob Landley <rob@...dley.net>,
	Embedded Linux mailing list <linux-embedded@...r.kernel.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, Sam Ravnborg <sam@...nborg.org>
Subject: Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.


On Jan 2, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Alejandro Mery wrote:

> Christoph Hellwig escribió:
>> On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 10:26:37AM +0100, Arkadiusz Miskiewicz wrote:
>>
>>> On Friday 02 of January 2009, Rob Landley wrote:
>>>
>>>> Before 2.6.25 (specifically git  
>>>> bdc807871d58285737d50dc6163d0feb72cb0dc2 )
>>>> building a Linux kernel never required perl to be installed on  
>>>> the build
>>>> system.  (Various development and debugging scripts were written  
>>>> in perl
>>>> and python and such, but they weren't involved in actually  
>>>> building a
>>>> kernel.) Building a kernel before 2.6.25 could be done with a  
>>>> minimal
>>>> system built from gcc, binutils, bash, make, busybox, uClibc, and  
>>>> the Linux
>>>> kernel, and nothing else.
>>>>
>>> And now bash is going to be required... while some distros don't  
>>> need/have
>>> bash. /bin/sh should be enough.
>>>
>>
>> *nod*  bash is in many ways a worse requirement than perl.  strict  
>> posix
>> /bin/sh + awk + sed would be nicest, but if that's too much work perl
>> seems reasonable.

>>
> well, bash is not worse as bash is trivial to cross-compile to run  
> on a
> constrained sandbox and perl is a nightmare, but I agree bash should  
> be
> avoided too.
>
> I think the $(( ... )) bash-ism can be replaced with a simple .c  
> helper toy.
>
> Thank Rob for reopening the topic.
>
> Alejandro Mery

And actually, one of the things that I just recalled, is that several  
of the Perl configure scripts in order to actually build itself, rely  
on Bourne shell calls. So the argument to require a strict POSIX+sed 
+awk implementation rather than Perl to build the kernel, fails, since  
you already require some variant of shell greater than strict POSIX / 
bin/sh to build Perl. So this is one less dependency.

Also, attempting to cross-compile Perl, is indeed a nightmare.

--
Mark Miller
mark@...ell.org




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