Question about Perl5 listed as a dependency for Samba3

[PingPing]

I've noticed the Samba3 package includes all of the client-side utilities as well as the server-side daemons and utilities.

smbd and nmbd appear to work without Perl5 (I get no errors when I invoke them at the command line).  I've read the Samba source code README and I've looked at the Debian repos to see what samba packages are dependent upon.  I couldn't see any glaring reference to Perl at all.  So I was wondering what Samba binary(ies) is(are) dependent on Perl5.

I see that Perl5 is listed as a dependency for CUPS which is a dependency for Samba.  If I don't want printer sharing will I still need Perl5?  If I do want printer sharing what part of Perl5 do I need?

Apologies for the questions but I'm trying to build a TCL remaster that acts as a stand-alone samba home file server and I want to pear it down to the very minimum (ie. just smbd, nmbd and smbpasswd) and Perl5 is a big package that I could do without, if possible.

[Juanito]

samba itself does not depend on perl - perl is listed as a dependency because either cups or gs depends on perl for the foomatic-rip script (and others). Since I use samba to share printers via cups, I needed to build samba with cups as a dependency.

If you're using samba as a file server, I do not believe you need perl loaded, but I believe you will need to load cups in order for the dependency on libcups to be satisfied. This issue was menioned before and I'm basically waiting for cups-1.4 to be released to re-compile the extension and separate libcups out from cups.

In the meantime, you could re-compile samba to remove the cups dependency, factor out libcups from the cups extension or just go ahead with loading the cups extension, but not the perl extension.

[PingPing]

I thought the dependency was CUPS related.  Thanks for the confirmation, Juanito. 
As to Samba, using 'ldd' I could only see that smbd was dependent upon libcups.so.2 and libcups.so.0.0.0.  I don't think there are any others CUPS-related dependencies in either smbd or nmbd.

[Juanito]

Yeah, if you're really looking to cut things down in size, you can untar the cups extension, delete everything except libcups+symlinks and tar/advdef the extension again

[PingPing]

Yeah, if you're really looking to cut things down in size, you can untar the cups extension, delete everything except libcups+symlinks and tar/advdef the extension again

I'm back to thinking about this.
Are you saying I can remove everything in the cups package except usr/local/lib?  Will this work for a non-Postscript printer?

[Juanito]

I'm a bit confused, you mentioned:

If I don't want printer sharing will I still need Perl5?

..but then you mention:

Are you saying I can remove everything in the cups package except usr/local/lib?  Will this work for a non-Postscript printer?

For me:

1. If you don't need printer sharing, you only need libcups to satisfy the samba dependency and you don't need perl.

2. If you do need printer sharing, you need all of the cups extension and you need perl - no doubt you could cut perl down, but I didn't try this.

[PingPing]

Thx Juanito.

Yeah, sorry about the confusion.  I was in a daze.  A guy downstairs in our apartment block was playing his Michael Jackson CDs until 4am in the morning, so when I wrote the post I was, well, pretty shagged out due to lack of sleep.  Your answer has clarified the Perl question for me.  Cheers.