Notification of major perl upgrades with triggers
perl has had a long-outstanding bug, #230308, concerning packages,
particularly long-running daemons, breaking on a major perl upgrade.
This is a similar situation to libc6, which currently has a debconf
prompt asking the local administrator for permission to restart related
daemons.
The preferred suggestion for perl currently seems to be that we make use
of a dpkg trigger, so that interested packages can register an interest
in the trigger and perform actions such as restarting daemons when the
trigger is activated.
A proof of concept exists at
<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=40;fileNAME=trigger-test.log;att=1;bug=230308#35331383733224564905>
and I plan to test this with perl 5.12 and spamassassin. My suggested
trigger name is perl-major-upgrade.
If these tests are successful, I would like this to be a part of the
perl 5.12 package which transitions to unstable in the future. I would
also submit a patch to the Debian Perl policy, documenting the existence
of the trigger and recommending that application packages use it if
desired.
I would be interested in any comments people have about this proposal.
Thanks,
Dominic.
--
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)
Reply to: