Hi Patrick, On Thu, 27 Mar 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > In the early days of Git, Perl was used quite prominently throughout the > project. This has changed significantly as almost all of the executables > we ship nowadays have eventually been rewritten in C. Only a handful of > subsystems remain that require Perl: > > - gitweb, a read-only web interface. > > - A couple of scripts that allow importing repositories from GNU Arch, > CVS and Subversion. > > - git-send-email(1), which can be used to send mails. There is also `git request-pull` which is a _shell_ script that runs `perl` to parse the output of `ls-remote`, and there is `git filter-branch` (which was apparently not yet dropped?) that uses Perl if the `--state-branch` option is in use. > - Our Perl bindings for Git. > > - The netrc Git credential helper. > > None of these subsystems can really be considered to be part of the > "core" of Git, and an installation without them is fully functional. > It is more likely than not that an end user wouldn't even notice that > any features are missing if those tools weren't installed. But while > Perl nowadays very much is an optional dependency of Git, there is a > significant limitation when Perl isn't available: developers cannot run > our test suite. > > Preceding commits have started to lift this restriction by removing the > strict dependency on Perl in many central parts of the test library. But > there are still many tests that rely on small Perl helpers to do various > different things. > > Introduce a new PERL_TEST_HELPERS prerequisite that guards all tests > that require Perl. This prerequisite is explicitly different than the > preexisting PERL prerequisite: > > - PERL records whether or not features depending on the Perl > interpreter are built. > > - PERL_TEST_HELPERS records whether or not a Perl interpreter is > available for our tests. > > By having these two separate prerequisites we can thus distinguish > between tests that inherently depend on Perl because the underlying > feature does, and those tests that depend on Perl because the test > itself is using Perl. > > Adapt all tests to set the PERL_TEST_HELPERS prerequisite as needed. The patch looks good, in particular when fetching the `b4/pks-t-perlless` branch from https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/git and inspecting 8fc639f99d9f manually, as it is a rather large patch that is pretty much unreviewable on a mailing list. Using several write-only `sed` invocations, I identified that there are only three hunks that are neither adding a stand-alone `PERL_TEST_HELPERS` prereq nor adding a test preamble of this form: if ! test_have_prereq PERL_TEST_HELPERS then skip_all='skipping <something>; Perl not available' test_done fi Skipping to only the affected files, these three instances are: > diff --git a/t/t5534-push-signed.sh b/t/t5534-push-signed.sh > index c91a62b77af..342d0423c92 100755 > --- a/t/t5534-push-signed.sh > +++ b/t/t5534-push-signed.sh > @@ -177,7 +177,7 @@ test_expect_success GPGSSH 'ssh signed push sends push certificate' ' > test_cmp expect dst/push-cert-status > ' > > -test_expect_success GPG 'inconsistent push options in signed push not allowed' ' > +test_expect_success GPG,PERL_TEST_HELPERS 'inconsistent push options in signed push not allowed' ' > # First, invoke receive-pack with dummy input to obtain its preamble. > prepare_dst && > git -C dst config receive.certnonceseed sekrit && Here, that prereq is appended. > diff --git a/t/t5601-clone.sh b/t/t5601-clone.sh > index d0c18660e33..d743d986c40 100755 > --- a/t/t5601-clone.sh > +++ b/t/t5601-clone.sh > @@ -649,7 +649,7 @@ test_expect_success 'GIT_TRACE_PACKFILE produces a usable pack' ' > git -C replay.git index-pack -v --stdin <tmp.pack > ' > > -test_expect_success 'clone on case-insensitive fs' ' > +test_expect_success PERL_TEST_HELPERS 'clone on case-insensitive fs' ' > git init icasefs && > ( > cd icasefs && > @@ -662,7 +662,7 @@ test_expect_success 'clone on case-insensitive fs' ' > ) > ' > > -test_expect_success CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS 'colliding file detection' ' > +test_expect_success PERL_TEST_HELPERS,CASE_INSENSITIVE_FS 'colliding file detection' ' > grep X icasefs/warning && > grep x icasefs/warning && > test_grep "the following paths have collided" icasefs/warning Here, too. > diff --git a/t/test-lib.sh b/t/test-lib.sh > index a62699d6c79..59162a3c834 100644 > --- a/t/test-lib.sh > +++ b/t/test-lib.sh > @@ -1706,6 +1706,7 @@ test -n "$USE_LIBPCRE2" && test_set_prereq LIBPCRE2 > test -z "$NO_GETTEXT" && test_set_prereq GETTEXT > test -n "$SANITIZE_LEAK" && test_set_prereq SANITIZE_LEAK > test -n "$GIT_VALGRIND_ENABLED" && test_set_prereq VALGRIND > +test -n "$PERL_PATH" && test_set_prereq PERL_TEST_HELPERS > > if test -z "$GIT_TEST_CHECK_CACHE_TREE" > then And this is obviously correct, too. Thank you, Johannes
