[Toybox] [PATCH] Add the current state of AOSP to the roadmap.

[Rob Landley]

On 10/04/2018 05:41 PM, enh wrote:
> +someone who might be able to give specifics, but i expect the answer
> is "that will be great in 3 years, but we're still building 3.10 and
> 4.4 and ..." :-/

I built those versions without perl. I started maintaining perl removal patches
when Peter Anvin added perl as a build dependency in 2.6.28 or so back in 2008.

https://lwn.net/Articles/313348/

And built every kernel version since then without perl, and resubmitted perl
removal patches to the kernel more or less annually for the next 5 years. The
3.9 versions would be the 3 linux-noperl*.patch files in:

https://github.com/landley/aboriginal/tree/871b5d5bae2fe16f9ed9eb7172643429f8eafba7/sources/patches

And I finally got them merged in 2013:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/27/396

Ala:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?0c0de199ce1f

Git describe says that commit was in the run up to v3.10. (v3.9-2170-hash) which
explains why 3.9 is the last full set in that tree.

Unfortunately only 2 of my 3 patches went in because Peter Anvin replaced one
perl dependency with a bc dependency. He's consistently like that for some
reason: he blocked my third patch and made sure busybox _couldn't_ build an
unmodified kernel. I dunno why he wants that to be the case. I blogged about it
at the time, http://landley.net/notes-2013.html#18-05-2013 and continued to
maintain a C version of the stuff he did in bc, but... bc _is_ technically
posix, and you know the history since. :)

Perl would occasionally crop up again, and I'd shoot it down again when it did, ala:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=d69911a68c86

The link last message was just the most _recent_ time perl has resurfaced. (And
perl didn't get cleaned out of various sub-features, like raid hash calculation,
until later because I wasn't building those in my aboriginal or mkroot projects.
But removing any given instance of perl generally isn't that hard to do, and
other people submitted patches for the remaining corner cases once I got the
ball rolling.

Seriously, point me at a kernel source tree and a .config, and I'll try to build
it without perl. I spent _years_ doing that...

Rob

P.S. I haven't been removing perl from things like "perf" or
"scripts/get_maintainer.pl" for the same reason I'm not trying to remove the
curses dependency from menuconfig. A development machine and a build machine are
two different things, the kernel _build_ is what should be free of perl.
Development can offer eclipse plugins for all I care...