Needing perl to build perl

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Hello,

I spotted that although we don't use debhelper (I assumed that this was
to avoid bootstrapping problems building perl with perl available - but
maybe it's just that no-one's wanted to go through and modernise the rules
file) we do use a few utilities from dpkg-dev written in perl:

debian/config.debian:
- dpkg-architecture

debian/rules:
- dpkg-parsechangelog
- dpkg-gencontrol
- dpkg-shlibdeps

Now, the reason I mention this is because I'm looking at building
perl with hardening flags (see [1]). The recommended way to get the
recommend build flags to use appears to be dpkg-buildflags, another perl
script.

My question is, I suppose: is there any reason not to start using
another perl script from dpkg-dev in the rules file, or should we be
aspiring not to require perl to build perl?

Dominic.

[1] <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/perl-maintainers/2012-January/002855.html>

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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