Hello Niko, Niko Tyni [2010-11-09 22:40 +0200]: > Until now, the perl-base package has been provided mostly for the > benefit of the Debian Installer and for limiting the functionality in > the Essential:yes package set. I don't think it was ever the intention > that end user systems would be left with just the 'perl-base' package > by default. Ah, thanks for pointing this out. > IMO the 'contents may change' part above is rather optimistic and removing > functionality from perl-base is already practically impossible. I don't > think this alone is a sufficient justification for prohibiting the use > of perl-base outside the base system. Right, so we shouldn't accept most of those patches for now, at least until Debian wants to support Perl-less systems as well and the policy gets updated accordingly. There are also perl library packages which don't import any particular Perl module, i. e. just use the core perl language. Also, libnss-mdns just uses "perl -i" in its postinst, but doesn't even ship perl modules. Do you think we can at least safely drop the perl dependency from those, since they don't make any assumptions about which modules perl-base ships? Since perl-base is essential, and there are maintainer and init scripts written in perl, it's guaranteed that /usr/bin/perl is available, after all. > I generally dislike the idea of packages reimplementing standard library > functions like dirname() in order to reduce the dependencies. This creates > patches that are not useful upstream, adding to the maintenance burden > in the long run. > > I'd much rather see a solution where the Perl core (aside from perl-base) > is split into small binary packages so that package dependencies can be > declared with finer granularity and the installation footprint cost of > using standard library functions is lower. I agree, that'd be much cleaner. I just changed some 5 packages so far to get a feeling about how difficult this task would be. But I'm happy to split out proper libperl-* from perl-modules with the stuff that's generally needed in a normal install, if you prefer this. Thank you, Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org)
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