Contents of a distribution and what can be sectioned out by Aaron Sherman

I just saw (belatedly) the discussion on use.perl.org. I'd like to
submit this idea for helping out the FreeBSD folk:

Ok, in my Linux distro of 5.6.0 (admittedly old, but workable for a
conversation), Pod and pod together make up about 3MB of documentation
that could be split into a perl-doc package.

unicode support adds over 3MB, and could also be split out.

most of [arch]/CORE and ExtUtils could be split out into a perl-devel
kind of thing, since libperl.a and the headers are only needed for
building Perl modules. That's about another 2-3MB. Note that this
(especially ExtUtils) is REQUIRED in order to install any additional
modules for Perl, but isn't required to run any of them, AFAIK.

There's about 3MB under [arch]/[os], which can probably go into -devel,
but not sure.

As you can see, the profusion of libraries (the other 6-7MB) is fairly
small compared to the documentation and OS-specific, development bits.

I think a language interpreter that comes with 6-7MB of libraries should
be reasonable for most purposes. If you're trying to build something
like a floppy-based distribution, you might have problems, but for
CD-based distribution, this is a fairly small price to pay for having
Perl at your disposal.

Here's the sizes for the top n biggest things under my
/usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0 on a Red Hat Linux system:

18032 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0
8620 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux
3320 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode
3240 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/linux
2884 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/pod
2264 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/CORE
1448 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/auto
1080 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/CORE/libperl.a
872 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/ExtUtils
708 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/auto/POSIX
628 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/Unicode.300
548 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/asm
480 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/Names.txt
380 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/Pod
364 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/LineBrk.txt
352 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/In
352 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/EAWidth.txt
340 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/Name.pl
340 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/unicode/Is
324 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/B
236 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/CORE/embed.h
224 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/pod/perlfunc.pod
204 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/CGI.pm
200 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/CPAN.pm
188 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/pod/perltoc.pod
180 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/i386-linux/Config.pm
152 /usr/lib/perl5/5.6.0/File

Good luck!