From: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
Organization: Boundaries Unlimited
To: Alejandro Mery <amery@opensde.org>
Subject: Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.
Date: Fri, 2 Jan 2009 05:15:32 -0600
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Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
       Arkadiusz Miskiewicz <a.miskiewicz@gmail.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
       Embedded Linux mailing list <linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org>,
       Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
       "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>, Sam Ravnborg <sam@ravnborg.org>
References: <200901020207.30359.rob@landley.net> <20090102094934.GB17841@infradead.org> <495DE995.1070002@opensde.org>
In-Reply-To: <495DE995.1070002@opensde.org>
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On Friday 02 January 2009 04:16:53 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.

No, $[ ] is the bashism, $(( )) is susv3:
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_06_04

I intentionally switched from $[ ] to $(( )) to make dash work.

Rob
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