Re: perl should be optional like tcl

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 22, 2008, 17:10 UTC
Message-ID: <20080322171001.GC7611@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <d512a4f30803220644j1c74642fne709e27da792850@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 02:44:06PM +0100, Sylvain Bertrand wrote:

> I'm a gentoo user and since a long time I have been able to disable
> the perl sweet thanks to the gentoo "-perl" use flag. Recently I
> realized that was not possible anymore (I have *tons* of perl
> dependencies pulled on my system because of this).

Sure, it is possible to do this, and most of git would still work. You would lose:

  - gitweb
  - interactive add ("git add -i")
  - send-email
  - CVS/SVN/arch integration (cvsimport, cvsserver, cvsexportcommit,
    svn, archimport)
  - git-relink (which I'm not sure is commonly used anyway)

The test scripts also use perl a bit, so you would lose the ability to run the tests.

The right way would probably be to add a NO_PERL flag to the Makefile to avoid building these programs. I'm not sure anyone else cares enough to spend time on this themselves, but you might try working up a patch.

-Peff