From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:37:25 GMT
Subject: Re: Git's tests have depended on Perl since at least 2006
Message-ID: <20100813223725.GA2153@burratino>
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTim9aNtFdwM5m-FB_LWX96es2DR_9mU3rGcV4dME@mail.gmail.com>

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> This is just an interesting datapoint, but Git's test suite currently
> crashes and burns if you don't have a perl in your $PATH, no matter if
> you've compiled with NO_PERL=YesPlease or not.

Yes, I think this was known.  Development machines (which is where
people tend to run tests most) tend to have perl but some weird
production machines did not.

> I have a WIP patch series to tackle this issue:
> 
>     http://github.com/avar/git/compare/git:pu...in-progress-dont-depend-on-perl
> 
> It adds a PERL dependency to things

Reasonable.

> and changes perl to
> "$PERL_PATH".

Is that necessary?  As you mentioned before, a lot of uses of perl are
for run-of-the-mill one-liners and do not care much which version they
get.

On the other hand, even if it is not necessary, it might still be a
good idea to just stick to one perl version for simplicity.