Re: Bug#629472: Handle deprecated modules in 5.12 and 5.14

[Dominic Hargreaves <dom@earth.li>]

[CCing lintian maintainers in case they offer any relevant advice]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 10:13:54PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 06, 2011 at 10:07:14PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

> > > Yet to analyze: Devel::Dprof and Perl4::CoreLibs. Assuming that wheezy
> > > releases with 5.14 and not 5.16, if we catch all uses of these before
> > > wheezy releases, we won't need to add Depends in wheezy+1 (but this
> > > assumption may turn out to be invalid).
> 
> This is looking very likely now, which is even more reason to do this
> analysis. I'll try and get this done soon.

I've made a start on this. I only found one package which uses
Devel::DProf (libapache-db-perl) and filed a bug for that (#636952).

The perl 4 libraries are more interesting; there are 127 packages
which appear to have files which use one or more of them. In many cases
it's likely that the files which use them either aren't installed, or
aren't used if they are. It's also possible that there are a couple of
false positives there, where there are private copies of the files
which are being used directly.

I suppose that this is too many packages to be filing bugs on, so maybe
the best way forward will be to get a check added to lintian. However, I'm
somewhat concerned that it will prove difficult to track progress based
on lintian.debian.org (it's more work for a maintainer to add a lintian
override than close a bug saying "confirmed that we aren't really using
these libraries") so in a way I would like to go ahead with the mass
bugfiling.

I'm also concerned that it will be difficult to get an accurate
representation of the issue with lintian; I generated my list of packages
by grepping source packages for the names of the libraries, then manually
processed the list stripping out lots of noise. It's possible one could
come up with a definitive pattern of ways in which the libraries could
be loaded from a perl script (do/require/use, single or double quotation
marks, ..?), but possibly tricky.

Any comments or suggestions welcomed.

Cheers,
Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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