Planned change to xorg-x11-font-utils

[Dan Williams]

On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 10:08 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> 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.

And this is exactly the issue we faced with more constrained platforms
like OLPC; we had to hack that perl dep out of the X package because
_nothing_ else in the platform depended on perl, we didn't want to ship
perl, and perl takes up 20MB of space that we didn't have.  Packagers
need to be more aggressive about splitting out deps from packages if
they want to be useful on targeted devices like the OLPC, the Classmate,
the eepc, and Fedora ARM.

Dan