Base 64-bit Cygwin now requires Perl?

[Chris J. Breisch]

Steven Penny wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Steven Penny wrote:
>> Because of this dependency line
>
> This issue is back again, now with
>
> man-db
>    lynx
>      perl
>
> OP
> http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2013-08/msg00152.html
>

Yes, this is true, and my guess is that it will remain so.

man-db depends on lynx, and that's not a dependency that is easily 
removed, even if I was inclined to try, which I'm not. It needs some 
sort of WWW browser. I don't think that can be disabled. It's not a 
configure option to do so, so it'd have to be handled through Cygwin 
specific patches to the source. I haven't looked into how difficult that 
would be yet. Perhaps it's not all that difficult. I'll take a glance 
when I get home.

While the browser doesn't have to be lynx, that's probably the simplest one.

lynx depends on perl. I'm not 100% sure this is a valid dependency. I 
don't notice that as a dependency on other systems. I think it comes 
from the fact that there's a sample perl script included in the 
installation. This is just sample code, and is merely to demonstrate 
using a perl script with lynx as a CGI. If Im correct and this is the 
reason for this dependency (I don't see anything else), it could likely 
be removed. I'm not the Cygwin project manager or the lynx maintainer, 
however, and such a decision would have to be left to them.

However, I wonder if the answer here isn't just to move perl into base. 
perl scripts are used everywhere, even in startup/shutdown scripts on 
some Unix systems. I think most people at this point expect a Unix 
environment to have perl.

So, yes, there are options to remove this dependency. The lynx one seems 
to me to be the easiest, but I could be wrong. As I said, I can take a 
look into seeing how difficult it would be to create a Cygwin specific 
version of mandb without browser capabilities. I'm not convinced it's 
worth crippling mandb just to remove this dependency, however.

Finally, I'm not sure that removing this dependency is worthwhile, 
regardless, but that's not my call.

-- 
Chris J. Breisch

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