Re: perl version depends
On Thu, 8 Oct 1998, Martin Schulze wrote:
joey>(I thought that debian-devel had reached a consensous that it's not
joey>a good idea to change the perl version less than 14 days before
joey>the code freeze.)
Well perl 5.005 is now installed in slink, and when it is
installed, alot of stuff breaks (anything for which perl has to include
non-standard modules (there are some heavily used non-standard
modules (web stuff, perl-tk perl-gtk, ... ).
It was supposed to just be a scramble to recompile several things.
But now its worse than that-- many more modules need to be repackaged.
The worst thing is that we are facing a policy decision on how to handle
the change in installation directories. It must be decided before people
can begin to fix the 80 odd broken packages. And policy issues tend to
get resolved slowly.
Raphael suggested modules installing to /usr/lib/perl5/debian and
then having the perl package include a symlink to the current version
number. Raphael offered to do some NMU's if people asked. I could help
too, once the policy is set.
We could also force a rebuild (developers) and upgrade (users)
every time x changes in 5.00x .
Another option is to put the old perl back
into slink until the issue can be resolved. Yet another is to configure
perl to install stuff according to the old format (the perl configuration
scripts can handle this easily ), since we will not have multiple version
of perl in the distribution at one time, and this is what the new system
is meant to handle.
I wrote to perl5-porters asking for some possible tips, but have
not heard back yet. I think we need to make a decision rather quickly.
If there are some debian developers who know something about the perl
development strategy, it would be good to hear from them. I don't know if
the perl people really expect everyone to redo the 'perl Makefile.PL ... '
process for every perl package evertime perl is upgraded, but it certainly
looks that way.
John Lapeyre <lapeyre@physics.arizona.edu>
Tucson,AZ http://www.physics.arizona.edu/~lapeyre
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