Re: GCC depending on perl?

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Sep 22, 2001, Andrew Cagney <ac131313@cygnus.com> wrote:

> I've noticed several recent changes to GCC have effectively added a
> dependency on PERL.  Well, to be exact, it looks like configure probes
> for perl and certain features and then adjusts the build accordingly.

Perl is only used to build man pages.  Man pages are included in
release tarballs, so perl is not needed to build releases.  People
building off CVS are expected to have a complete build environment,
with all tools necessary to build files that are not in CVS.

> I'd have only expected such a dependency to be added when something
> like --enable-maintainer-mode was explicitly specified as part of the
> configuration.

--enable-maintainer-mode isn't described in the GNU Coding Standards
either.  We're still trying to figure out what should be
maintainer-mode and what shouldn't, to draft up a section for the GCS,
open it up for discussion, and then adjust the GCC Makefiles to
comply.  The current arrangement seems to be good enough for GCC
developers and random users, but it's certainly something people who
run the release scripts have to be concerned about, to make sure they
don't create tarballs with empty man-pages.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me