[BUG][CRASH] perl: command not found

[Ashvith10]

Version of Kakoune

v2025.06.03

Reproducer

1. You must be on NixOS or Guix System, or alternatively in other distros, run Nixpkgs or Guix as a third-party package manager, and access kakoune in a pure shell
2. Go to a sample repository
3. Access kakoune using:

# for Guix
guix shell kakoune -- kak ./file/to/git-blame.c

# for Nix
nix-shell -p kakoune --run "kak ./file/to/git-blame.c"

4. Type :git blame

Outcome

It should fail with the message: failed to run git blame, see *debug* buffer. On inspecting :buffer *debug*, we see that perl is missing as a dependency.

Expectations

Other distros include perl in their base and it works, but in Guix and NixOS, it is isolated as a build/native input, and therefore, not accessible to the environment after build. Adding perl as an input should resolve this issue in both the distributions, however it should also be mentioned in the README.md that perl is one of the many dependencies of kakoune.

Additional information

• Guix System/NixOS
• It is using the latest stable version
• As long as Guix/Nixpkgs is installed as a third-party packager in a non-Guix/non-Nix distro, or if you're using NixOS or Guix System

[krobelus]

Looks like Git has almost no Perl dependency left. git send-email is a notable exception.
Alpine Linux packages git without the perl optional dependency.

I gues awk is available in all cases. It might be inconvenient to use awk, I'm not sure.
Commit f27f6fa (rc git: fix "git blame" on macOS with perl rewrite, 2023-11-12) is one example problem.

[Here](#2176 (comment) in a56c39d) is the original reason for adding perl in a56c39d (Improve git gutter, 2018-07-01): because "awk doesn't have regex capture groups". I guess that could be solved in a different way somehow.

If we wrote these scripts in C++ we wouldn't have this problem. But for now this might do

diff --git a/README.asciidoc b/README.asciidoc
index e415e62edc..b049994f1d 100644
--- a/README.asciidoc
+++ b/README.asciidoc
@@ -105,6 +105,7 @@
 
  * A {cpp}20 compliant compiler (GCC >= 10.3 or clang >= 11) along with its
    associated {cpp} standard library (libstdc{pp} >= 10 or libc{pp})
+ * Optionally, if you wish to use the integrations for the *diff*, *git* or *patch* tools, a Perl interpreter.
 
 To build, just type *make* in the root directory.
 To generate man pages, type *make man* in the root directory.

kakoune-lsp had the same problem; it's an optional dependency:

    evaluate-commands %sh{
        if ! command -v perl > /dev/null; then
            printf "fail %{'perl' must be installed to use the 'lsp-snippets-insert' command'}"
        fi
    }

[Ashvith10]

@krobelus When I tried running Kakoune in an isolated container, it looks like there's even more dependencies. For example, sed, head, and find, which are all part of coreutils, sed and findutils. I think it would be nice to document them.

For reproduction:

$ guix shell kakoune -CPW -- kak

[krobelus]

When I tried running Kakoune in an isolated container, it looks like there's even more dependencies. For example, `sed`, `head`, and `find`, which are all part of coreutil. I think it would be nice to document them.

maybe diff --git a/README.asciidoc b/README.asciidoc index e415e62edc..a5f1585f96 100644 --- a/README.asciidoc +++ b/README.asciidoc @@ -112,6 +112,12 @@ Kakoune can be built on Linux, MacOS, and Cygwin. Due to Kakoune relying heavily on being in a Unix-like environment, no native Windows version is planned. +Runtime Dependencies +~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ + + * https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/idx/xcu.html[POSIX Shell & Utilities] + * Optionally, a Perl interpreter, if you wish to use the integrations for the *diff*, *git* or *patch* tools. + Installing ~~~~~~~~~~