GCC depending on perl?

[Andrew Cagney]

>> 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 know about the pre-built manpages)

A user of a distribution gets different behavour and different results 
depending on if and which perl they have installed.  A distribution's 
build behavour should be far more robust than that.

Andrew