pixman and perl

[Frédéric L. W. Meunier]

On Fri, 23 Oct 2009, Justin P. Mattock wrote:

> Alan Coopersmith wrote:
>> John Taylor wrote:
>>
>>> Dan wrote:
>>>
>>>> Interesting.
>>>>
>>>> Personally, I don't like Python. That is to say, I've learned a bit of
>>>> Python, and I don't like programming in it. But as Python is used by my
>>>> distribution's package management system ( Gentoo ), I have Python
>>>> installed on my system, and I've never really thought more about it.
>>>>
>>>> What did Perl do to you anyway? Just curious.
>>>>
>>> It may seem strange, but I don't like perl because of the way it must be
>>> installed. As far as I remember, it has not a configure script and a
>>> makefile.
>>>
>>
>> Umm... I'm pretty sure Larry Wall invented configure scripts, originally
>> for rn, then perl - and then the GNU project built autoconf to make
>> creating them easier for the rest of us.   Perhaps you're confusing perl
>> with something else?
>>
>>
> In any case I guess just hack pkgconfiig i.g.
> /usr/lib*/pkgconfig/*.pc
> ( to pass configure)
> but then unfortunately depending how your
> build is, you could run into issues later on down the line,
> or maybe during the build i.g. -lpython etc..
>
> try it out and see(personally seems more work
> to do so, but then again seems interesting).

To bypass the perl detection without editing configure, it's 
just a matter of symlinking /usr/bin/perl to something else, or 
create a fake /usr/bin/perl, since configure just checks if 
'perl' is present.

Anyway, Perl is widely used by many things, like Autoconf and 
Automake. On the other hand, I rarely touch anything 
Python-based, and didn't have it installed for years until 
recently. I also had to install Ruby just to run an 
autogen.sh...