Re: Release Plans (1999-05-10)

[Raphael Hertzog <rhertzog@hrnet.fr>]

[ I'm responding to myself in order to precise things, there was some
  informations missing in the previous message ]
[ Followup on debian-perl, please ]
Le Thu, May 13, 1999 at 06:32:00PM +0200, Raphael Hertzog écrivait:
> This is true if perl5.004 will still be used, but as you know, perl5.005 
> has some binary incompatiblity for binary modules. And actual binary
> modules will be replaced by newly compiled ones and will depend on
> perl5.005. So if you have one binary module on your system and if
> people upgrade it, perl5.005 will be automatically installed. And
> /usr/bin/perl will be changed. And then the problems may arise.

In fact, we must agree to use the latest perl. Because there's the
same problem with non-binary perl modules. If they are built with
the latest perl, they'll be installed in a versionned directory and
therefore they will have to depend on perl5.005

Zephaniah, you must understand that the fact we decided to have multiple
perls do not ONLY have to do to the fact that we want a smooth upgrade but
also that we do want to make multiple perl available so that we can
use #!/usr/lib/perl5.004 in script that do specifically need such
a perl.

And we CAN have a smooth upgrade even with perl5.005 as the default
perl. The important point is that all modules in Debian must have
been built with the same perl version and that perl keeps /usr/lib/perl5
in @INC (only for potato release, after that we'll get rid of it because
the scripts that would break will already be corrected).

And I do not want to minimize the importance of the perl5.005 upgrade,
there are many little issues affecting MANY packages :
- of course perl modules must be rebuilt
- postint scripts of some packages must be corrected
- all package depending on perl will have to depend on perl5. If they
  need a specific version of perl, they'll have to set a dependency to
  perl5.XXX. This is not mandatory, but should be done for consistency,
  because the perl package will only be a fake package (like xbase was)
  depending on perl5.004. BTW, I think that perl should depend on
  perl5.004 | perl5.005 ... otherwise with perl5.005 installed, a
  package depending on perl would have dependencies problems. :-)

Cheers,
-- 
Hertzog Raphaël >> 0C4CABF1 >> http://prope.insa-lyon.fr/~rhertzog/