I'm trying to meet a (probably overly aggressive) personal goal of having zero NEW rawhide bugs (which are not Package Reviews) by the time of Fedora 10 GA. Along the way I thought I'd post some of the questions and issues I see while triaging these bugs so we can all learn. I encourage others to do the same. I've just knocked the list down to close to 500!
If you want to join in and help the query for NEW rawhide bugs excluding package reviews is here: http://tinyurl.com/6llac8
Here is what I have so far:
# Is there a general policy around using perl in pre/post ? https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462996
Not that I know of, but it is good practice to avoid creating unneccessary dependancies if there are alternatives, particularly if the choice is between a large package & small package. Many perl scripts can be done just as well with a short piece of awk/sed. This makes it much easier for people who want to build minimal/small Fedora images because they don't unneccessarily bring in the entire of Perl just for a %post script. Not that I want to single out perl - the same rationale would apply to unneccessary use of python, if the use in question could be easily written in awk/sed.
Fully agreed, but ... consider both python and perl
- are part of the base-packages Fedora is based on.
- there are other dependencies adding much more bloat to "minimal
installs"
That's not entirely true. In fact its very easy now to run a complete gnome desktop without perl at all. I'm doing it quite successfully with rawhide on my eeePC. I've filed a number of bugs (the one mentioned above it done by me) to fix issues with dependencies on perl since the alpha release, unfortunately a number of the bug fixes didn't make the beta but have since made it to rawhide (evolution, gstreamer-plugins-base, libbonobo now all don't depend on perl) there have also been a number of others that have split the perl dependency out into a sub package. The only other package that depends on perl just because of the pre/post scripts is docbook-dtds. The bug for that one is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=462997 and not having it is a bit of a bummer as evince depends on that package and viewing PDFs is quite useful. I would ultimately like to see the Live CD not depending on perl. This will save a number of meg off the build. Python is quite a bit harder as it is used in a lot of RH systems packages.
Peter