On Fri, Nov 01, 2013 at 10:30:45PM +0100, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
Hello
Recently I'm getting mails about Launchpad build failure reports for the inkscape-trunk package. The log seems to suggest that it's not our fault (some dependency problems apparently), but it looks interesting for different reasons:
We have Gimp and bash-completion as a build dependency. Why on earth is that?
One of the unmet dependencies is libxml-parser-perl. Why do we
require this? It looks like we have just four extensions written in Perl - perhaps we could rewrite them in Python and avoid Perl as a hard dependency.
outline2svg.pl and txt2svg.pl can simply be dropped; those were proof-of-concepts I wrote as examples of the extension system when it was introduced, and serve no real world purpose.
ill2svg.pl likely can also just be dropped; I don't recall it really worked all that well to begin with, and looks like it hasn't been maintained.
embed_raster_in_svg.pl theoretically serves a useful purpose, and should be trivial to rewrite in python, but I'm wondering if there's already an equivalent functionality in Inkscape proper? If not, it'd be the only one really worth bothering porting.
There's also a SpSVG.pm perl module which can be dropped as Perl is removed; it's rather antique.
And another perl module Inkscape.pm, which aims to provide a high level Perl wrapper around Inkscape internals, but it looks like it didn't get very far along in development and its API is very limited. I think it can be safely dropped.
If there still are any Perl extension writers who need any of these bits or otherwise want to collaborate on Perl extension code, we could encourage them to set up a focused Perl extension repository, so the Inkscape core doesn't need to carry Perl as a dependency any more.
Bryce