Getting Rid Of Perl

At the LUG barbecue last week, I was talking to Neil W. about getting rid of the dependency on Perl in Debian, specifically for very small systems (his main focus is on embedded devices like phones and PDAs).

I decided to give it a shot on bolan. The biggie is debconf, which is written in Perl. There’s a replacement, cdebconf, but unfortunately it’s even bigger, since it depends on GTK+. Now, GTK+ doesn’t have to depend on X11, it can output to a framebuffer (like recent versions of debian-installer do). However, because of some awkward dependencies, it not only depends on a lot of X11 libraries, but also defoma, the Debian Font Manager. And defoma is written in…Perl.

Unfortunately, as it’s written in C, it’s likely to be a little more difficult to dynamically load the GTK+ stuff…