On Thu, May 30, 2002 at 03:25:04PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > Like I said, that's a very high price to pay, and I've yet to see
> > any justification for that price.  Please enlighten me.
> 
> What costs do you see here?  I see very very little real cost.  Sure you
> might not want to install perl on every NetBSD/vax or similarly slow and
> ancient machine in the world, but why would you even build packages over
> and over again on every such machine?  If you're going to be building
> any significant number of packages on a slow VAX or such then you're
> going to end up installing the likes of perl and GNU m4 et al anyway.
> Beyond that the GNU auto* tools are just a simple set of scripts and
> data files -- nothing complex or huge or in any way "very costly".

Tosh. Forcing everyone to have Perl installed on a build machine is
a huge cost. I have slow i486 boxes, and ss2s, upon which it takes
significant amount of time simply to build Perl. Having access to the
Perl source is another significant factor.
 
However, you have not answered the question.  The question I asked
was why you want to force everyone to have Perl installed on their
build machines just so that they can apply patches.

Thanks,
Alistair