On Tuesday 06 October 2009 00:03:50 NeilBrown wrote: > On Tue, October 6, 2009 3:44 pm, Rob Landley wrote: > > On Monday 05 October 2009 18:57:14 berk walker wrote: > >> Rob Landley wrote: > >> > On Monday 05 October 2009 11:01:39 Vladimir Dronnikov wrote: > >> >> From: Vladimir Dronnikov <dronnikov@xxxxxxxxx> > >> >> > >> >> drivers/md/unroll.pl replaced by awk script to drop build-time > >> >> dependency on perl > >> >> > >> >> Signed-off-by: Vladimir Dronnikov <dronnikov@xxxxxxxxx> > >> > > >> > Acked-by: Rob Landley <rob@xxxxxxxxxxx> > >> > > >> > We already discussed this on another mailing list, thread starts at: > >> > > >> > http://lists.impactlinux.com/pipermail/firmware-impactlinux.com/2009-O > >> >cto ber/000328.html > >> > > >> > I've added this as patch #4 in the perl removal series I've submitted > >> > during the last few merge windows. > >> > > >> > Thanks, > >> > > >> > Rob > >> > >> Why is perl being removed? [I know that I have missed a lot] > >> berk- > > > > Before 2.6.25 the kernel build had never used perl, > > Uhhhmmmm. md has used perl for creating some C files since > RAID6 was added, which is before the dawn of git. > > So I don't think this statement is true. I was wrong, my mistake. (The kernel builds I was doing had never needed perl, but I wasn't building raid for any target systems. The systems that had raid were generally big suckers using distro kernels. Vladimir _is_ building with raid support, so he addressed the issue.) My current perl removal patch series started when timeconst.pl came in, meaning you couldn't build any kernel without perl anymore because _everything_ uses time constants. My current patch to remove that is something like the fifth version I've had to do to keep up with various changes to the kernel since then. Most recently reposted here: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0909.2/01661.html Before that, I noticed (and removed) perl from the User Mode Linux build in 2005: http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0503.1/0806.html It's not _just_ perl, it's gratuitous build dependencies in general, which make a cross-compiler's life unpleasant. For example, there was a window during which you needed curses development headers to run "make oldconfig" (and that leaked into uClibc's copy of kconfig when they synced with upstream), but it was pretty easy to patch out and Sam Ravnborg had already fixed it upstream before I got around to pushing that. I hit this sort of thing and have to fix it locally, life is easier for me if it's fixed upstream so I don't have to maintain out-of-tree patches... Thanks, Rob -- Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
