Re: building without perl

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 10:12 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
>> I'm a bit confused as to what we're trying to support.
>
> You are not supposed to need perl to build from a release tarball
> (except on Windows which doesn't have a decent make or shell, so we
> depend on perl instead).  You do need it to build from a CVS checkout.
> Same story as bison/flex.

FWIW, README.CVS mentions bison and flex but not perl.

So, is our policy that it's OK to use perl to generate things, as long
as they are things that are architecture-independent and
configuration-independent therefore could be pregenerated for the
release tarball?  If so, it seems we might be able to punt
Gen_fmgrtab.sh and just keep Gen_fmgrtab.pl...

>> make -C ../../../../src/port all
>> make[5]: Entering directory `/home/rhaas/pgsql-git/src/port'
>> make[5]: Nothing to be done for `all'.
>> make[5]: Leaving directory `/home/rhaas/pgsql-git/src/port'
>> "" ./parse.pl . < ../../../../src/backend/parser/gram.y > preproc.y
>> /bin/sh: : command not found
>> make[4]: *** [preproc.y] Error 127
>> make[4]: *** Deleting file `preproc.y'
>
> Hmm, that's a new dependency on perl, and it wasn't properly guarded
> ... will fix.
>
>> I think the last time that I ran into a machine that didn't have perl on
>> it was not more recently than 1994 (I'm guessing someone is now going
>> to tell me what a sheltered life I lead...).
>
> Yup.

I suppose this was intended to be funny, but I'd be curious as to the details.

...Robert