Re: Status of circulars dependencies in unstable

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Russ Allbery 

| Yeah, perl-modules really does depend on perl, in that the package is
| actively broken and will break other things, not just merely unusable,
| without it.  Note that perl-modules has a ton of Provides, and something
| depending on one of those provided modules without depending on perl
| itself is likely to break if only perl-modules gets installed.

The description of the perl-modules package is

 Note that this package only exists to save archive space and should be
 considered an internal implementation detail of the `perl' package.
 Other packages should not depend on `perl-modules' directly, they
 should use `perl' (which depends on `perl-modules') instead.

Given this, is there any reason those provides are in the perl-modules
package rather than the perl packages itself?  (yes, it's technically a lie, but
apart from that.)

It sounds to me like perl should have a strict (= ${Source:version})
dependency on perl-modules and nothing should ever depend on
perl-modules, but I don't know if this has been considered and what the
possible downsides are?

Regards,
-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are