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  • Dropping perl? (Was: Re: Dropping awk?)

    From Gioele Barabucci@21:1/5 to Jonathan Dowland on Sat Apr 19 00:10:01 2025
    On 18/04/25 23:17, Jonathan Dowland wrote:
    On Thu Apr 17, 2025 at 7:23 PM BST, Simon Josefsson wrote:
    I noticed that Fedora 42 was released and their docker images lack a
    'awk' tool.

    They likely lack perl, as well. Most/all awk usage in maintainer scripts could probably be replaced with perl. But, if you are in the minimizing
    game, perhaps you'd rather remove perl from the essential set? A substantially harder project.

    My hobby for the past three years has been working on removing perl from
    the transitive essential set.

    It's very doable. I have PoC VMs where perl is not installed at all. I'm
    very slowly polishing and upstreaming my changes: I've sent dozens
    (hundreds?) of patches and there now are only about 40 maintscripts
    where perl is directly used. Most importantly, I've already removed all
    uses of perl from postrm maintscripts in bookworm. I've also written
    shell-only replacements of Perl programs used in the transitive
    essential set.

    Once forky is open for development I may send a more public announcement
    of this project.

    Regards,

    --
    Gioele Barabucci

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