Re: [PATCH v3 00/20] t: drop Perl as a mandatory prerequisite

> while Git was initially building on Perl quite a lot, the significance
> of Perl has been dwindling over the years as more and more functionality
> was converted into C builtins. Nowadays, an installation with Perl-based
> features disabled is almost fully functional, only a handful of features
> remain that require Perl:
>
>   - gitweb, a read-only web interface.
>
>   - A couple of scripts that allow importing repositories from GNU Arch,
>     CVS and Subversion.
>
>   - git-send-email(1), which can be used to send mails.
>
>   - Our Perl bindings for Git.
>
>   - The netrc Git credential helper.
>
> None of these features really are critical for day-to-day usage of Git,
> and most users probably wouldn't even notice if those features were not
> installed. Perl is thus very much optional nowadays.
>
> There is one big exception though: it is impossible to run our test
> suite without a Perl interpreter, so it is not easily possible to verify
> that a Perl-less installation actually works as expected. For most of
> the part though our test suite doesn't use all that much Perl, either.
> It is present in a couple of critical paths, but those are easy to adapt
> to not use Perl anymore.
>
> This is exactly what this patch series does: it refactors a couple of
> central parts in our test suite to not use Perl anymore so that it
> becomes possible to run most of our tests entirely without Perl. Tests
> that still depend on Perl are marked with a new PERL_TEST_HELPERS prereq
> so that they only execute when a Perl interpreter is available.
>
> With this patch series, 30342 out of 31358 tests pass, which is around
> 97% of our tests.