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

[enh]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 7:32 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>
> 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...

sorry, dwillemsen investigated and it turned out that our guess was
completely wrong... it was actually a script to generate payloads for
the A/B OTA system. switched to python (which we're already committed
to prebuilts for) by
https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/system/update_engine/+/779514.

but, yes, please keep up the good work keeping perl out of the build :-)

> 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...