Re: [PATCH] NO_PERL support

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 3, 2009, 20:20 UTC
Message-ID: <7vocvd8p6s.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090403171514.GA11112@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 8 quoted lines

> Do we want to also skip those? Do we want to place the burden on
> authors of the test suite to always check for NO_PERL whenever they use
> perl?
>
> The other option would be saying "we support building with NO_PERL, but
> not running the test suite".
>
> Thoughts?

Yes, no, and probably not.

Let me clarify the last "probably not" first, because it will be the reason behind the first "Yes".

Saying "We support building but not testing" is like saying "we don't support it", and honestly, we'd be better off leaving this patch out of tree if that is what we are going to do. Even though I am not personally very enthused about NO_PERL, the Makefile patch itself does not look too bad, and if we can finish this with very limited injury to the overall codebase, I wouldn't mind carrying the option in-tree.

        Side note: by the way, what did you or Robin's patch do to
        Documentation/cmd-list.perl and other bits of build infrastructure
        that rely on Perl?

To solve the second "no" cleanly, I am wondering if we can do something clever by defining $PERL to be used in t/t*.sh scripts. They should be using configured PERL_PATH for running the tests _anyway_, even though I see many hits from "git grep -e perl t/" right now.

But even if there isn't a room for doing something clever there, I think the test prerequisite framework J6t did recently should be usable without cluttering the test suite too much. That forces test authors to be aware of NO_PERL, which is slightly yucky, but if it cannot be helped, I think we can survive. We do the same for UTF8 and SYMLINKS already.