[Libguestfs] IRC question: Will Perl [..] remain a binding but not a requirement?

04:33 < darius93> will perl ever be deprecated in libguestfs to where it can still remain a binding but not a requirement for the tools? We use Perl 5 in a few places: (1) There is a Perl binding to the API: http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-perl.3.html (2) It is used in places in the build system. Some examples: - many tests in the test suite are written in Perl - the man pages are written in POD ("plain old documentation") format and POD processing tools are required to process them into man/txt/html (https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/podwrapper.pl.in) (3) It is used for a few tools: virt-win-reg, virt-list-filesystems, virt-list-partitions, virt-tar. These are all in the tools/ directory of the source: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/tree/master/tools (4) Perl is used to implement the 'edit' commands of guestfish, virt-edit, and virt-customize: http://libguestfs.org/virt-edit.1.html#non-interactive-editing - - - (1) is never going away. (2) is not going away either, simply because there are too many tests and too much documentation to rewrite. So you're going to need to have a Perl interpreter to build libguestfs for the foreseeable future. (3) Apart from virt-win-reg, these tools are deprecated (in fact we have long deleted these tools downstream in Fedora and RHEL). I intend one day to rewrite virt-win-reg in C, but haven't got around to that. (4) You don't need to install the Perl interpreter for this, but some relatively minor features that rely on Perl will fail to work. I'm interested if there are any platforms / distros where having a Perl 5 interpreter is a real problem (and not some kind of "purity" thing). Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW