On Fri, 2009-01-02 at 04:30 -0600, Mark Miller wrote: > On Jan 2, 2009, at 4:16 AM, Alejandro Mery wrote: > > > Christoph Hellwig escribió: > >> On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 10:26:37AM +0100, Arkadiusz Miskiewicz wrote: > >> > >>> On Friday 02 of January 2009, Rob Landley wrote: > >>> > >>>> Before 2.6.25 (specifically git > >>>> bdc807871d58285737d50dc6163d0feb72cb0dc2 ) > >>>> building a Linux kernel never required perl to be installed on > >>>> the build > >>>> system. (Various development and debugging scripts were written > >>>> in perl > >>>> and python and such, but they weren't involved in actually > >>>> building a > >>>> kernel.) Building a kernel before 2.6.25 could be done with a > >>>> minimal > >>>> system built from gcc, binutils, bash, make, busybox, uClibc, and > >>>> the Linux > >>>> kernel, and nothing else. > >>>> > >>> And now bash is going to be required... while some distros don't > >>> need/have > >>> bash. /bin/sh should be enough. > >>> > >> > >> *nod* bash is in many ways a worse requirement than perl. strict > >> posix > >> /bin/sh + awk + sed would be nicest, but if that's too much work perl > >> seems reasonable. > > >> > > well, bash is not worse as bash is trivial to cross-compile to run > > on a > > constrained sandbox and perl is a nightmare, but I agree bash should > > be > > avoided too. > > > > I think the $(( ... )) bash-ism can be replaced with a simple .c > > helper toy. > > > > Thank Rob for reopening the topic. > > > > Alejandro Mery > > And actually, one of the things that I just recalled, is that several > of the Perl configure scripts in order to actually build itself, rely > on Bourne shell calls. So the argument to require a strict POSIX+sed > +awk implementation rather than Perl to build the kernel, fails, since > you already require some variant of shell greater than strict POSIX / > bin/sh to build Perl. So this is one less dependency. > > Also, attempting to cross-compile Perl, is indeed a nightmare. > Having cross compiled Perl, on to a Unix with a brain dead third party TCP/IP no less, only 4 years after starting to use Unix / Linux I can attest that it is not that difficult to cross compile. Heck it even runs on those weird Crays that don't know which byte sex they are. Matt -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
