Re: [PATCH 1/1] md: drivers/md/unroll.pl replaced with awk analog

From: Rob Landley
Date: Tue Oct 06 2009 - 02:37:36 EST


On Tuesday 06 October 2009 00:03:50 NeilBrown wrote:
> On Tue, October 6, 2009 3:44 pm, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Monday 05 October 2009 18:57:14 berk walker wrote:
> >> Rob Landley wrote:
> >> > On Monday 05 October 2009 11:01:39 Vladimir Dronnikov wrote:
> >> >> From: Vladimir Dronnikov <dronnikov@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> >>
> >> >> drivers/md/unroll.pl replaced by awk script to drop build-time
> >> >> dependency on perl
> >> >>
> >> >> Signed-off-by: Vladimir Dronnikov <dronnikov@xxxxxxxxx>
> >> >
> >> > Acked-by: Rob Landley <rob@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> >> >
> >> > We already discussed this on another mailing list, thread starts at:
> >> >
> >> > http://lists.impactlinux.com/pipermail/firmware-impactlinux.com/2009-O
> >> >cto ber/000328.html
> >> >
> >> > I've added this as patch #4 in the perl removal series I've submitted
> >> > during the last few merge windows.
> >> >
> >> > Thanks,
> >> >
> >> > Rob
> >>
> >> Why is perl being removed? [I know that I have missed a lot]
> >> berk-
> >
> > Before 2.6.25 the kernel build had never used perl,
>
> Uhhhmmmm. md has used perl for creating some C files since
> RAID6 was added, which is before the dawn of git.
>
> So I don't think this statement is true.

I was wrong, my mistake. (The kernel builds I was doing had never needed
perl, but I wasn't building raid for any target systems. The systems that had
raid were generally big suckers using distro kernels. Vladimir _is_ building
with raid support, so he addressed the issue.)

My current perl removal patch series started when timeconst.pl came in,
meaning you couldn't build any kernel without perl anymore because
_everything_ uses time constants. My current patch to remove that is
something like the fifth version I've had to do to keep up with various changes
to the kernel since then. Most recently reposted here:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0909.2/01661.html

Before that, I noticed (and removed) perl from the User Mode Linux build in
2005:

http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0503.1/0806.html

It's not _just_ perl, it's gratuitous build dependencies in general, which
make a cross-compiler's life unpleasant. For example, there was a window
during which you needed curses development headers to run "make oldconfig" (and
that leaked into uClibc's copy of kconfig when they synced with upstream), but
it was pretty easy to patch out and Sam Ravnborg had already fixed it upstream
before I got around to pushing that.

I hit this sort of thing and have to fix it locally, life is easier for me if
it's fixed upstream so I don't have to maintain out-of-tree patches...

Thanks,

Rob
--
Latency is more important than throughput. It's that simple. - Linus Torvalds
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