Subject: Re: bug#12715: [PATCH] build: do not require help2man at build-from-tarball time

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:04:05 +0200 (CEST)

----- Mail original -----
> De: "Jim Meyering" <[email-masked]>
> À: "Stefano Lattarini" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: "Pádraig Brady" <[email-masked]>, "Mike Frysinger" <[email-masked]>, [email-masked],
> [email-masked]
> Envoyé: Mercredi 24 Octobre 2012 15:07:18
> Objet: bug#12715: [PATCH] build: do not require help2man at	build-from-tarball time
> 
> Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> > Here is the updated patch.  Sorry for the noise,
> ...
> > Subject: [PATCH] build: graceful degradation in man pages
> > generation if perl
> >  is lacking
> 

> 
> Does anyone know of a well-known environment/distro in which
> coreutils is built without perl?  I.e., if virtually no one
> builds coreutils without perl, then any attempt to coddle those
> users is wasted complexity.
> 
Speaking for what I know, this is not an issue with 'linux from scratch' based systems.
- perl is an host requirement (coreutils is build a first time on toolchain stage),
- perl is build on toolchain stage before final coreutils is build.

Any toolchain that really cross-compile often avoid perl as notoriously hard to cross-compile.
Often busybox is used instead of coreutils. Openwrt for example does that.
Openwrt could optionally build coreutils. The build script use 8.16 and patch to not build the doc.

Gilles