Help me triage

[Peter Robinson]

>> > 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