that's the day I'll eat my red hat

You can do that right now. Sabotage Linux rewrote the one and only perl dependency in awk years ago.

Grab https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage/ma... and clobber the perl script in the Linux source.

Then: sed -i -e 's@perl $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@awk -f $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@' ./lib/Makefile

They also removed the perl dependency for ca-certificates since one of the goals was to remove perl dependencies from the core system including its toolchain and kernel. It's not needed at all now.

This Aho project is neat because it has the potential of removing the perl dependency on having a git client, which was a problem prior.