Akemi Yagi wrote: > On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:59 PM, John Summerfield > <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote: >> Akemi Yagi wrote: >> >>> ( questions, since I dont use perl myself ) >> Try removing it. I think you will find you do:-) There's rather a lot of >> packages depend on it including. KDE, spamasassin, mysql, emacs, rpm-build, >> gnome (I think), xorg, postfix, java, ghostscript and squid. > > I do use perl :-) The portion you quoted above is part of Karanbir's > message. Of course we all know what he meant by that statement... yes, I pruned a little aggressively. yes, he implies it doesn't matter to him. My point is it probably matters to him more than he realises:-) In my reading up on the topic, I found someone mentioned that it would be good to have a benchmark. Someone else poopooed the idea. I'd like to support the idea of a kind of benchmark. A while back, I worked on some IBM software, including its PL/I compiler. One of my tasks was to run some testcases. Some of these testcases dated back around thirty years! Mostly, they were to ensure conformance to some documented standards and to verify bugs fixed before were still fixed. As you might expect on reflection, sometimes a failure was a success (the program was expected to fail), and often the output varied from one run to another (eg time/date on listings). Unexpected results had to be examined, explained and maybe fixed. Running such a test suite on PERL makes sense (and is probably done). One of the outcomes that needs to be measured and explained is the time (and other resources) it takes to run the tests, and how it compares with expectations. In this case, measuring the time and resources would/should have identified the problem. Arguably, this should be done/monitored by Red Hat. -- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu -- Advice http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 You cannot reply off-list:-)