[Libguestfs] IRC question: Will Perl [..] remain a binding but not a requirement?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

04:33 < darius93> will perl ever be deprecated in libguestfs to where
                  it can still remain a binding but not a requirement
                  for the tools?

We use Perl 5 in a few places:

(1) There is a Perl binding to the API:

    http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-perl.3.html

(2) It is used in places in the build system.  Some examples:

  - many tests in the test suite are written in Perl

  - the man pages are written in POD ("plain old documentation")
    format and POD processing tools are required to process them into
    man/txt/html
    (https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/podwrapper.pl.in)

(3) It is used for a few tools: virt-win-reg, virt-list-filesystems,
    virt-list-partitions, virt-tar.  These are all in the tools/
    directory of the source:

    https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/tree/master/tools

(4) Perl is used to implement the 'edit' commands of guestfish,
    virt-edit, and virt-customize:

    http://libguestfs.org/virt-edit.1.html#non-interactive-editing

	- - -

(1) is never going away.

(2) is not going away either, simply because there are too many tests
    and too much documentation to rewrite.  So you're going to need to
    have a Perl interpreter to build libguestfs for the foreseeable
    future.

(3) Apart from virt-win-reg, these tools are deprecated (in fact we
    have long deleted these tools downstream in Fedora and RHEL).  I
    intend one day to rewrite virt-win-reg in C, but haven't got
    around to that.

(4) You don't need to install the Perl interpreter for this, but some
    relatively minor features that rely on Perl will fail to work.

I'm interested if there are any platforms / distros where having a
Perl 5 interpreter is a real problem (and not some kind of "purity"
thing).

Rich.

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