Comment 3 for bug 487456

That's nothing. In fact, to run grub-mkconfig you need *python*

$ grep -H lsb_release /etc/default/grub
/etc/default/grub:GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`

And all that just to do a trivial "echo Distroname" job. I suggest you focus on replacing python code first. Python takes more than double than bash!

But that's not all, debconf depends on *perl*!! Just check the size of libperl.so.5.10.0. There's definitely more profit in having cdebconf take over.