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Re: Broken dependencies in current state of perl upgrade



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Oliver Elphick, in an immanent manifestation of deity, wrote:
>What makes a package depend on a particular version of perl?  I have
>adopted the changes made by Raphael Hertzog in his NMU.  That put the
>dependency ${perl:Depends} in the control file, which translates to a
>versioned dependency on perl-5.005.  As far as I know, there's nothing in
>the package itself to require a particular version of perl, but I don't
>understand the ramifications of this change.
>
>(The package in question is libpgperl from postgresql.)

Anytime a Perl package includes XS code, it will depend on a specific
version of Perl.  XS code is the native Perl interface to writing shared
objects that can be loaded into the running Perl.  The .004/.005 number
is also called APIVERSION.

Frequently, XS is written to interface with a library (libpg in this
case).  The XS is needed to perform the appropriate translations to call 
the C library functions from Perl.  The XS also translates the return
values and any side effects so that Perl can understand it again.

Hope this clears things up some.

Darren
- -- 
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Darren Stalder/2608 Second Ave, @282/Seattle, WA 98121-1212/USA/+1-800-921-4996
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