Why does Fedpra's perl need systemtap?

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 12/12/2010 07:11 AM, Iain Arnell wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 11:31 AM, Ralf Corsepius<rc040203 at freenet.de>  wrote:
>>
>> Would you please explain in detail why Fedora's perl needs systemtap and
>> what it uses it for?
>>
>> As I tried to outline in the BZ above, the consequence on perl and
>> Fedora are dramatic.
>
> I think you're over-exaggerating the consequences, Ralf.
May-be, one consequence however is perl and python now being glued together.

This may have quite some amount of nasty side-effects on major upgrades.

> It's not perl that requires systemtap; it's perl-devel that requires
> systemtap-sdt-devel. Ideally, almost no-one should need to have
> perl-devel installed;
Correct.

Fact also is, all of us around here hardly can avoid not having it 
installed,

> it should really only be necessary when building
> XS modules or linking with libperl. Unfortunately, our packaging is
> less than perfect, so a few packages end up pulling in perl-devel
> unnecessarily (mostly through Test::Builder and Test::More).
Exactly.

> I'm going
> to take a look at removing some of these where the requirement is
> obviously wrong. And for things like SQL-Translator that include their
> own test modules, I'd suggest splitting off a separate
> perl-Test-SQL-Translator sub-package.
>
> As for your other concern that systemtap-sdt-devel is pulling in
> python, have you ever tried to "yum remove python"? Like it or not,
> python is a pretty fundamental requirement in Fedora and will be
> present on just about every installation anyway.
Sure, we can't avoid RH's addiction to python, but that's not my point.

It's the impact glueing perl and python together has on upgrades, such 
as user-upgrade from Fedora N -> Fedora N+1, or python/perl version jumps.

This impact already is visible when upgrading Fedora 13 to Fedora 14.

That's why I am asking
* Why does perl need systemtap?
* What does perl use systemtap for?

So far, I haven't seen any answer to these questions.


When regarding this from one angle, this is simpla a matter of lack of 
communication, however when regarding this from a different angle, this 
leaves room for speculations along the lines of how "@RHs treat the 
community" rsp. about RH's governance in Fedora. Provided the language 
certain @RH's used in bugzilla, I for one have little doubts about what 
is going on.

Ralf