Re: where is perl 5.6?
Joey Hess, in an immanent manifestation of deity, wrote:
>There was plenty of excuse for nothing being done about packaging perl 5.6
>for Debian while potato was in the freeze, but that has been no excuse for
>1 and a half months now, and in that time I've not seen perl's maintainer
>doing anything to get perl 5.6 into Debian. But just 2 days after
>Debian's release, Brendan O'Dea stunned me by producing perl 5.6 debs that
>dropped into a Debian system, and acted as the default perl without
>breaking anything. Even better, they reverted the package name back to
>"perl" (no more perl-5.005 unsightliness), and they have a very
>intelligent way of using dependancies to deal with future changes in the
>perl XS module API without requiring such ugly package names in the
>future.
>all. Darren, are you still there? Doesn't anyone care about getting perl
>5.6 into Debian?
I don't have good reasons for this but only really excuses.
In my defense, in the last week, I've added interpreter threads, moved
the perl-\d+-doc package to binary-indep and a few other things. Note
that I've done -Dthreads -Dithreads since that's the future of threading
in Perl rather than -D5005threads. If you need that, there is
perl-5.005-threads.
When I get back from Vancouver, I'd like to release another version on
my web site to make sure that my changes don't break other things.
I need to do a couple things to release 5.6.0-0.2:
* get the update-alternatives priorities worked out so that perl 5.6
comes out as the correct (highest) alternative
* an alternate is to come up with some other way to have multiple
Perls installed
* Production environments regularly need multiple Perls installed so
we can't go One Perl
* Build libperl-5.6 - should be easy, I've got the patches for it from
Branden
* Use the suggested method of removing unneeded libraries from the
main Perl executable as suggested on p5p in
<000e01c01bc2$88b2d2c0$0e14140a@bfs.phone.com> and
<000001c020ef$d10c7120$1614140a@bfs.phone.com>.
Something like this is in bleedperl now and will be in Perl 5.7.
* Look at Branden's patches and adapt them the applicable ones.
* Use new libc?
The first two are pretty trivial. If I wasn't going to Vancouver for a
staff meeting later today, I could have it done by midweek. I don't
know about Branden's patches yet and I don't know how much work (if any)
is involved in going to the new libc.
As it is, I should have at least the first three by week end. From
there, in the next week, I should fix any problems people have and
release perl 5.6 to woody by 15 October.
After that release, I'd like to take out all the bugs that are against
Perl. I suspect that many of them can just be closed, the others can be
fixed in subsequent releases.
If I can't keep to this pretty simple schedule then I'm obviously not
committed enough to Perl on Debian and someone else should take it for
the good of Perl and the good of Debian.
If you're not interested in my excuses for not doing enough work on
Debian, you can stop reading now.
Over the last 9 months, I've:
* Gone through hell in my last job
* Gotten a new job that is in a different city and country; I mostly
telecommute.
* Presented a Perl paper
* Lost a member of the family. (It was a ferret rather than a human but
it was still crushing.)
* Had a serious enough psychological problem that I needed to seek
professional help. (I got it and the cap is put back on. I'll be
going back later when I'm integrated into this new job.)
I'm pretty much getting integrated into this new job and am getting into
a good flow again. All of my packages are languishing and need
attention. Expect more soon.
Darren
--
<torin@daft.com><http://www.daft.com/~torin/> <torin@debian.org><perl@slut.org>
Darren Stalder/2608 Second Ave, @282/Seattle, WA 98121-1212/USA/+1-206-ELF-LIPZ
@ Make a little hot-tub in your soul. @
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