[resending to debian-devel-announce as suggested by fellow developers; apologies to those who already received this via other lists.] There's a Perl transition (#796345) expected in the next couple of months: Perl 5.22 packages have been in experimental since June, and the list of blockers is getting lower. The worst blocker is currently libapache2-mod-perl2, which needs upstream porting (#787493). See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=perl-5.22-transition;users=debian-perl@lists.debian.org for a list of bugs related to this transition. This mail provides advanced warning about some changes in the perl packaging for 5.22. In the vast majority of cases, no action is needed, so this is mainly for information. However, should you have strong objections to these changes for some reason, please voice them now if possible. The binary packages built from src:perl version 5.22 in experimental have been reorganized to allow for keeping older versions of libperl5.xx installable, and to allow for marking them Multi-Arch:same so that they can be co-installed for multiple architectures. As src:perl already builds (possibly too) many packages, we tried not to increase their number (and the associated complexity) further. Therefore we have integrated the non-essential parts of the standard library shipped with Perl into the libperl5.xx package instead of creating a new package like perl-stdlib-5.xx. Packages using Perl modules from the standard library should still depend on just 'perl', which pulls in everything necessary. We have kept perl-base self contained for robustness, as it's Essential:yes. As an implementation detail, we now ship two copies of the small parts of the standard library that are considered Essential:yes: one copy in the perl-base package and another in libperl5.xx. This increases disk space usage by about 3M for non-minimal systems (with perl/libperl5.xx installed), and is done to accommodate foreign architecture libperl5.xx installations. We have also renamed perl-modules to perl-modules-5.xx so that multiple versions of it can be co-installable. The perl-modules-5.22 package currently Provides:perl-modules for transitional reasons. As a side effect, installing libperl5.xx now installs the full Perl standard library (about 32M). It is therefore no longer possible to install an application with an embedded Perl interpreter but stick with just the perl-base parts of the library. We think this is acceptable and even desirable: a Perl interpreter without the standard library is a crippled one and should only be sighted in exceptional circumstances. This split was discussed in the Perl team sprint in Barcelona, May 2015. See <https://people.debian.org/~ntyni/perl/libperl/> for some background material visualizing the options; the chosen option is "S" in the slides. -- Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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