Bug#757891: init-system-helpers: Please do not depend on perl

[Michael Stapelberg]

Hi Brendan,

Brendan O'Dea <bod at c47.org> writes:
> and identifying the new requirements which would need to move from
> perl-modules to perl base, gives a delta of ~150Kib on my work
> machine:
I think an increase of 150 KiB is perfectly fine when it frees us from
unnecessary reimplementation work, whose only potential outcome is to
introduce new bugs :).

> Looking at deb-systemd-helper, it also uses Data::Dumper for some
> debug messages, which is not part of perl-base either.  This could
> potentially be worked around with something along the lines of:
>
>   eval { require Data::Dumper; } or *Data::Dumper::Dumper = sub { "no
> Data::Dumper" }
I’m happy to add something like that for the Data::Dumper dependency.

> It does occur to me however that if rsyslog (or any other packages
> controlled by init for that matter) are going to be installed as part
> of the initial base system by d-i, then is it is worth simplifying the
> run-time dependencies of init-system-helpers by rewriting it in C?
Absolutely not. I have written enough C code in my life that I really
really don’t want to do this and I think it’d be actively harmful. The
perl code we have is well tested and reasonably simple to understand.

-- 
Best regards,
Michael