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

[Mark Miller]

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@xxxxxxxxxx




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