Wanted X, got Perl - operator error or prequisiste

[Harold L Hunt II]

Matt,

You did almost enough research.

You are correct that none of the XFree86 packages depends directory or 
indirectly upon Perl.  The little bit of extra research that I did for 
you (other than looking at my setup.hint files again) was to run a clean 
instance of setup.exe (after renaming c:\cygiwn to c:\cygwin_foo), 
select all of the XFree86 packages, then note that perl has still not 
been selected.  Thus, no XFree86 packages causes perl to be selected.

Here is what happened (even if you don't remember it):

1) You saw package foo (say, autoconf)

2) You thought, ``I might like to have foo''

3) You selected foo, which depends upon perl and caused perl to be selected

4) You thought, ``Nah, I will never use foo''

5) You unselected foo, which left all of its dependencies (including 
perl) selected

6) You got perl ;)


Step 5 is crucial there: setup.exe does not unselect dependencies when 
you remove an item from the list of packages to install.  Think about 
it, how would we track whether a user selected the package or if it was 
selected by dependency?  Why spend the extra effort tracking such things 
when this is the first time I have seen someone ask about this in the 2 
or 3 years that I have been working with Cygwin/XFree86?

You are correct that XFree86 does not depend upon Perl... you just got 
unlucky.

The *.pl scripts in XFree86 mean nothing --- they are not needed for the 
normal operation of the X Server.


I hope that clears things up,

Harold

Matthew O. Persico wrote:
> On Thu, 8 May 2003 22:19:03 -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, May 08, 2003 at 10:10:55PM -0400, Matthew O. Persico wrote:
>>
>>>Subject says it all.
>>
>>http://cygwin.com/problems.html
>>
>>says it all, too.
>>
> 
> 
> The following searches were performed on the email archives
> 
> XFree and perl - 45 hits
> XFree and require - 120
> XFree and requirements - 17
> XFree and prerequisites - 17
> 
> A scan of the subjects and a number of the email bodies led me to message msg01159.html, which concerned how to create a package for
> installation using the setup.exe program including setup.hints. I made a quick detour to a shareware site to grab a .bz2 reader to see if I could find
> those files in the bz2 packages on my disk. I could not find them.
> 
> However, I did check the setup.ini file. perl is listed as a dependency of only
> 
> 	autoconf_devel/stable
> 	automake_devel/stable
> 	dpkg
> 	enscript
> 	rpm
> 	tetex-bin
> 
> However, none of the packages whose category was XFree86 listed perl or any of the above mentioned programs as a dependency.
> 
> A find / -name \*.pl revealed (among other things)
> /usr/X11R6/bin/bdftruncate.pl
> /usr/X11R6/bin/ucs2any.pl
> /usr/X11R6/sbin/fvwm/2.4.7/FvwmConsoleC.pl
> /usr/X11R6/share/fvwm/fvwm-script-ComExample.pl
> /usr/X11R6/share/fvwm/fvwm-script-setup95.pl
> 
> Since these are perl scripts in the X11R6 tree, I have to assume that perl is a requirement.
> 
> However, that assumption doesn't quite jibe with the fact that I couldn't find an explicit requirement anywhere in setup files.
> 
> AFTER doing all that research, I felt I still did not have a definitive answer and therefore, I asked the question "Is perl a prerequisite of XFree".
> 
> Next time I post a question, I will post the research done. I will also in the future post XFree questions to the cygwin-xfree list, not the main cygwin
> list.
> 
> Thank you
> --
> Matthew O. Persico
> 
> 


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