Re: Perl modules and perl upgrade

[Chip Salzenberg <chip@perlsupport.com>]

According to Zephaniah E. Hull:
> For programs which will work with perl5.004 or 5.005 then they can
> depend on (perl5.004 | perl5.005), but we have no way of knowing if
> they will work with perl5.006, and the upstream perl maintainers
> have proven that they will break things on such 'minor' level version
> changes.

Um, could you please give an example of such breakage?  We've been
extraordinarily careful not to break existing code when updating Perl,
and I'd hate to see our effort be discounted as a failure.

BTW: It might save Debian developers a lot of trouble to have separate
Debian directories for pure Perl modules (no shared libraries) and
Perl extensions (with shared libraries).  It's extremely rare for Perl
version updates to break Pure perl code, whereas extensions are likely
to require recompilation at least.

Thus e.g. libwww-perl could live in the pure Perl library directory
and simply depend on "perl5", whereas libdbi-perl would live in the
5.005 extensions directory and depend on "perl5.005".
-- 
Chip Salzenberg      - a.k.a. -      <chip@perlsupport.com>
      "When do you work?"   "Whenever I'm not busy."