Hi Patrick, On Thu, 27 Mar 2025, Patrick Steinhardt wrote: > while Git was initially building on Perl quite a lot, the significance > of Perl has been dwindling over the years as more and more functionality > was converted into C builtins. Nowadays, an installation with Perl-based > features disabled is almost fully functional, only a handful of features > 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. > > - Our Perl bindings for Git. > > - The netrc Git credential helper. > > None of these features really are critical for day-to-day usage of Git, > and most users probably wouldn't even notice if those features were not > installed. Perl is thus very much optional nowadays. > > There is one big exception though: it is impossible to run our test > suite without a Perl interpreter, so it is not easily possible to verify > that a Perl-less installation actually works as expected. For most of > the part though our test suite doesn't use all that much Perl, either. > It is present in a couple of critical paths, but those are easy to adapt > to not use Perl anymore. > > This is exactly what this patch series does: it refactors a couple of > central parts in our test suite to not use Perl anymore so that it > becomes possible to run most of our tests entirely without Perl. Tests > that still depend on Perl are marked with a new PERL_TEST_HELPERS prereq > so that they only execute when a Perl interpreter is available. > > With this patch series, 30342 out of 31358 tests pass, which is around > 97% of our tests. Thank you so much for working on this. I finally finished my review, I simply ran out of time yesterday. The patches look good to me, and the result even more so.
