Hi Patrick, On Wed, 2 Apr 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > On Tue, Apr 01, 2025 at 08:26:36PM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote: > > 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. > > Ah, indeed, thanks! > > I should probably mark both of these to require Perl in our build > systems so that we have a source of truth what requires Perl and what > doesn't. git-filter-branch(1) also looks somewhat broken because it uses > Perl directly instead of using PERL_PATH. True. > On the other hand, maybe the better fix would be to just convert tools > to not use Perl at all anymore so that we can eventually get rid of this > dependency altogether. It feels like we're quite close, and many of > these conversions are low-hanging fruit. As for `git filter-branch`, we could simply -- what were the wise words of Elijah's mentor? -- "debug" it. I.e. delete it and be happy about it. > > 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 > > Thanks for double checking! You're welcome. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that it took me quite a bit of time, I believe it was around an hour, to validate this patch alone. Ciao, Johannes
