Re: Experimental patch: generating BKI revisited

Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>
>> Tom Lane escribió:
>>
>>> Yeah. Although the project policy is that we don't require Perl to
>>> build on Unix, there was a bug in the makefiles that made it effectively
>>> required, and nobody noticed for several years. I don't think it would
>>> be a hard sell to change that policy if we got a significant benefit out
>>> of it. (Depending on non-core Perl modules is a totally different thing
>>> though.)
>>>
>
>
>> Well, this is a pretty fortunate turn of events. I had two paragraphs
>> in my original email that I edited out ("... so I'm not going to say
>> more") on how to workaround the lack of Perl. If we're all OK now on
>> requiring some basic Perl installation then all the better. I certainly
>> have no trouble with it.
>>
>
> Although actually, we could still keep that policy if Perl is needed to
> build .bki files --- we just have to build those files in distprep and
> ship them as part of tarballs. It's already the case that you need Perl
> to build from a CVS pull, it's only tarball users who don't need it.
>
>
>

That's all true. But maybe it's time to look again at this anyway. Perl
is pretty darn ubiquitous these days. And awk-fu is getting rarer and rarer.

cheers

andrew