Planned change to xorg-x11-font-utils

Adam Jackson ajackson at redhat.com
Fri Dec 7 15:08:54 UTC 2007


On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 06:12 +0000, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> Adam Jackson <ajackson <at> redhat.com> writes:
> > I plan to drop bdftruncate from font-utils to get rid of the perl bloat,
> > unless someone has a compelling reason not to.
> 
> What's the problem with depending on Perl? It's a useful scripting language, 
> used in a lot of packages, thus so many things require it that you'll be 
> hard-pressed to find a working system without Perl, especially an X11-enabled 
> one. For example, kdelibs requires Perl (it's used for things like 
> kconf_update), so any KDE system will always have Perl anyway.

I'm not arguing against perl qua perl.  I am arguing against needless
arcs in the dep graph.  This one package has a perl dependency solely
because it provides a single perl script that no one is ever likely to
use.

Sure, it's just one dep, but every dep counts.  The complexity of the
graph directly affects runtime performance for rpm and yum, and the
ability to use trimmed subsets of Fedora for custom purposes.  The graph
is important.  We argue so much for correcness in initial packaging.  We
should be correct at the system level too.

- ajax




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