Cannot build without another Perl

[JonathanWilbur]

Description
Perl cannot be built without using another Perl. I found a repo where somebody managed to bootstrap Perl by using hard-coded files and other tricks, but having to pull of this much of a stunt just to build Perl without an existing Perl is obnoxious. It would be really nice if there were just C programs that would compile and run to perform any setup needed for a build.

Expected behavior
Be able to build Perl without an existing Perl.

Perl configuration
I am trying this with Perl 5.40.0, fetched from the CPAN website.

I would like to add that I would be will to submit a PR to convert the Perl scripts to C programs, if somebody can just point out what/where these are, and if this idea isn't rejected outright.

[guest20]

@JonathanWilbur Where were you building it? Some kind of jail, or a docker or something like that?

[JonathanWilbur]

It was in docker, yes.

[xenu]

I've just built perl-5.40.0 on a clean Alpine Linux installation with no perl present, and it finished successfully.

What errors are you getting?

[mauke]

Perl cannot be built without using another Perl.

citation needed

[demerphq]

I wonder if there is a difference between building Perl using a git repo, and using a tarball. I STR that we do require Perl to build from a git checkout, but we dont for a tarball.

[demerphq]

The linked repo seems to be for 5.000?

[JonathanWilbur]

I see. That was a mistake on my part. I guess it used to require an existing Perl?

Building with no existing Perl did work for me; it didn't work the first time because I was copying generated files into the Docker container, which is obviously not how it was intended to be used.

Sorry, I guess I should have actually tested it for myself, but I assumed this to still be true when I saw this in INSTALL:

First, make sure you have an up-to-date version of Perl.

In light of my reading that you need an existing Perl, I interpreted the above sentence to mean that you need an existing Perl.

Sorry to have jumped the gun, but I guess now you have a "tombstone issue" so others can see that this is no longer a requirement to build. Thank you for your help! Closing.

[mauke]

What INSTALL means is really: "First, make sure you have an up-to-date version of [the] Perl [source code]."

You don't need perl just to build perl and I don't think you ever did.

If you're a developer working on perl, you may have to regenerate certain derived files, which requires perl. But that's exactly why those files are generated during development: So users can just compile them without having to install bison or a binary version of perl first.