Subject: Re: PATCH [0/3]: Simplify the kernel build by removing perl.
From: Matt Keenan <tank.en.mate@gmail.com>
To: Mark Miller <mark@mirell.org>
Cc: Alejandro Mery <amery@opensde.org>, Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
       Arkadiusz Miskiewicz <a.miskiewicz@gmail.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>,
       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>
In-Reply-To: <865953A9-E699-45E1-A726-F3F4EE41A0C9@mirell.org>
References: <200901020207.30359.rob@landley.net>
	 <200901021026.37905.a.miskiewicz@gmail.com>
	 <20090102094934.GB17841@infradead.org> <495DE995.1070002@opensde.org>
	 <865953A9-E699-45E1-A726-F3F4EE41A0C9@mirell.org>
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Date: Fri, 02 Jan 2009 11:18:52 +0000
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On Fri, 2009-01-02 at 04:30 -0600, Mark Miller wrote:
> 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.
> 

Having cross compiled Perl, on to a Unix with a brain dead third party
TCP/IP no less, only 4 years after starting to use Unix / Linux I can
attest that it is not that difficult to cross compile. Heck it even runs
on those weird Crays that don't know which byte sex they are.

Matt


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