Quite some time ago I rewrote our large and unwieldy collection of build-time shell and awk scripts in Python 3: 7a2ce7d (Then I got a little overambitious and tried to get rid of libtool as well, and then the day job intervened and I haven't touched the code in months.)

I would like to dust this patch off and merge it, but it has occurred to me that it might make life easier for our downstream redistributors if the language used was Perl instead of Python. Automake is written in Perl, so that interpreter is already part of the bootstrap set, where Python might not be.

I'm personally more fluent in Python, but I'd be fine with either, all told.

@solardiz @ldv-alt @fweimer @rfc1036 I know you've all worked on redistribution issues in the past, what do you think?

(N.B. The existing Python script ka-table-gen.py would not be rewritten in Perl, because as far as I know there is no Perl equivalent of passlib. But that script is not run during a normal build, so it doesn't matter.)