[Diederich]

Aye; this should have been done a long time ago. I wanted to say 'since the beginning' (whenever that was), but maybe there were good reasons 20 years ago that I can't recall.

It probably made sense when disk space was a lot more constrained.

[toyg]

It just wasn't the practice back in the day. Does redhat ship a "platform-perl"?

[vetinari]

As far as I remember, there is no perl at all in minimal install of v7.