Re: [libvirt] Release of libvirt-1.0.1

On Thu, Dec 20, 2012 at 11:57:37AM -0700, Eric Blake wrote: > [trimming libvirt-announce from cc] > > On 12/19/2012 04:03 PM, Jason Helfman wrote: >> I will be committing this to the FreeBSD portstree this week. One item that >> has held this up for me was repeated build failures. >> >> In looking through the code, I found out that perl was introduced as a >> build dependency, but I didn't see this noted anywhere in the notes or the >> spec files. > > Perl has been a bootstrap requirement when building from git for some > time now, although we have tried to keep away from making it a build > requirement. Therefore, this looks like a regression, for not > gracefully building the package from a tarball without perl present. > What was the exact failure you hit, so we can correct that? Basically, > any file that requires perl should be pre-built as part of 'make dist', > so that building a tarball will not need perl. Likewise, any place > where 'make check' runs a perl-based test, those tests should gracefully > be skipped if perl is not present. We've required perl for 'make check' since 0.9.13 (check-symfile.pl, and now also check-symsorting.pl). We've also required perl for 'make' if dtrace is enabled (dtrace2systemtap.pl). IMHO, requiring perl is absolutely fine. It is probably the most ported / portable piece of software out there - even more so than gcc / python, not to mention all the other libraries we already depend on.