Bug#497887: lintian: check for unnecessary versioned dependencies on Perl core modules
Package: lintian
Version: 1.24.4
Severity: wishlist
It would be useful if lintian could warn about unnecessary versioned
dependencies on packages provided by the perl core packages. It's quite
easy to make mistakes like #497170, and often perfectly valid dependencies
turn stale with updates to the Perl core, as in #497263.
Alternate dependencies listing the core package first like
perl-modules (>= 5.10) | libfile-temp-perl (>= 0.17)
are of course perfectly OK and ease backporting, so they need to be
taken into account.
The implementation could use corelist(1) and/or Module::Corelist to
check if the version in the dependency is already in the core. I think
just transforming libfoo-bar-perl to Foo::Bar would catch most issues,
and the rest (like podlators-perl -> Pod::Man) could be special cased.
A good test case is the libmodule-build-perl package, which is currently
pulled in by a dozen or so outdated versioned build-dependencies.
I'll probably take a shot at a patch myself when I find the time, but
feel free to do it first :) Ideas welcome.
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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