[Interest] Oops! Somebody's got a bad case of dependency bloat!

[Cyrus Harrison]

Hi Everyone,

Q: Is perl needed for both the headers & documentation?

If the documentation was included three times in previous source 
releases, couldn't that issue be resolved or maybe the 
documentationcould be omitted if it consumes too much space?

For those that don't have full reign over their computers (no package 
manager access, or no admin rights, etc) these issues can be quite 
frustrating. Perhaps we are the minority, but a `batteries included' 
approach benefits everyone.

Are their any platform customizations applied when generating the headers?

If not, for us poor souls, it sounds like one ugly solution would be to 
steal the headers from one of the binary releases, and copy them into a 
source release. Not caring about disk space or network traffic issues - 
that might be easier to automate than becoming a perl caretaker on 
several types of platforms.

Is there / could there be a target that just generates the headers and 
creates a new source release package? This would allow folks like us to 
easily create our own tarball on one platform, and use it on others to 
avoid the perl dependency. It won't solve everyone build predicament, 
but it could help and maybe some kind soul could post tarballs for other 
folks.

One last comment: Active State Perl comes with different license terms 
than Qt. Probably not a deal breaker, but it does require legal 
consideration. I am a huge Qt fan, I am sure the other vocal folks on 
this list are as well.
The take away is: barriers like these - even if they seem quite small - 
will dampen adoption.


-Cyrus

On 04/10/13 09:11, Thiago Macieira wrote:
> On quarta-feira, 10 de abril de 2013 09.34.57, Michael Jackson wrote:
>> I'd really like to know who thought that needing perl for the build was a
>> good idea when not all the platforms have it as a base installed software
>> package.
> Perl is a standard tool in most operating systems, which also provide a
> compiler and a decent shell for free. Those people running operating systems
> that don't supply a decent set of development tools can easily download it
> from official sources.
>
> And like Kai said, it's on the README.
>
> Perl is not out-of-the-blue, it's not a recent language and it's not AT ALL
> obscure. I might accept those arguments for Ruby and *maybe* for Python. No,
> for Perl we don't accept it. Just install it.
>
> ActivePerl is good.
>
>
>
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