Re: Bug#532932: ITP: libalien-libjio-perl -- Perl package to find libjio
Brian:
On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 5:57 PM, brian m.
carlson<sandals@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 05:14:29PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote:
>> This module is a generic Perl module that is designed to install libjio if it
>> is not installed, and then report the flags required for programs to link to
>> it. Under Debian, installing libjio via this package is not necessary (since
>> it can simply Build-Depend and Depend on the libjio package itself.
>>
>> However, the Perl module still needs to be installed so that Perl programs can
>> find it, and the flags required to link to it. This will be useful if modules
>> other than simply IO::Journal (later to be ITP'd as libio-journal-perl, once
>> it is appropriately uploaded to CPAN).
>>
>> Luckily, since only the Perl stuff is going to be installed, then it's not
>> likely we'll ever need to really upgrade this module...
>
> Can't you just patch the modules in question so that they don't need to
> use this module? It seems silly to create a module just to make sure
> that a dependency is installed. That's for the Perl module building
> system or dpkg to ensure.
That is a very good point. However, I'm just not sure if other modules
will want to use Alien::Libjio -- it has a few methods that wrap
around pkg-config and ExtUtils::Liblist, so that you can get compile
flags and linker flags (that applications need to compile XS bindings
against libjio).
I did consider the idea of patching at first, but I wasn't sure that
would be good in the event that a module other than IO::Journal needs
that functionality. On the other hand, I suppose you are correct - for
Debian systems, we can always expect libjio to be in the right place,
and so this module might be unnecessary to package.
I'll need to think about this more. I did file the ITP but it's sort
of tentative, and I might retract it later pending further
review/discussion.
FYI it should be mentioned that there is at least one module which is
a precedent for this type of behaviour, see libalien-wxwidgets-perl.
We do have libwx-perl (the WxWidgets Perl Bindings), and we do have
the WxWidgets toolkit itself, so one could also argue for the same
thing with libalien-wxwidgets-perl.
Ideally, we'd figure out a (Perl package-specific) policy on what to
do about Alien:: modules.
I've attached the Debian-Perl group list too, so we'll probably end up
having a discussion there as well.
>
> If we had a separate Perl module to ensure every dependency that a Perl
> module might need, we'd have lots of unnecessary modules.
Thanks for the advice!
Cheers,
Jonathan
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