Hello all,

This debate has cropped up on a mailing list for a project I'm involved in. Unfortunately we're quite a small bunch at the moment, so I want to ask a wider audience.

We're writing a C library (for arbitrary precision arithmetic) and are investigating build systems. Currently we have a bash script in desperate need of work. I believe we can't use autotools etc due to licensing (bsd vs gpl). So I suggested we use a modern scripting language like python or perl.

The question is: is having something like perl or python around at build time an unrealistic dependency on Unix-like platforms these days?