Re: Trouble with ensembl preconditions
On Mon, Jan 09, 2012 at 07:39:07AM +0800, Richard Holland wrote:
> libwww-perl-5.808 is a really nasty hack (it breaks an awful lot of other stuff if it is installed) and in an ideal world we wanted to avoid having to install it at all. To be honest I'm not sure how we got it to work in the first place, but it certainly did at one point - I think this problem could be a result of a change in another package that didn't conflict before. There's a couple of package conflicts declared in the libwww-perl-5.808 packaging but there might be many more that we don't already know about.
I'm more or less aware of this situation and I think a further split of
official libwww-perl is requiring additional Conflicts. I just wanted
to make sure that I did not missed anything before I add other Conflicts
to libwww-perl-5.808. I'm now in the process of testing ensembl in a
chroot after having cleaned up lintian issues to do some tests whether
it installs and deinstalls cleanly (if I'm not missleaded it does not
properly deinstall).
> Ensembl has a single Perl script that depends on libwww-perl-5.808 (somewhere in the BLAST code), and without that script it is not needed at all.
Can you or Nick say which exact script this might be?
> The script does not work with newer versions of libwww-perl. We've been on at the upstream people for ages about removing the dependency on that specific version but they have no enthusiasm in doing so for as long as it still works on their machines with the old libwww-perl installed then it doesn't cause them enough of a headache to get it changed. If there's a volunteer out there who'd like to have a go at fixing the script themselves, you're more than welcome, and we will do our best to get the patch submitted upstream (although they do not always accept external patches, on the grounds that they do not have time to test them).
While I never used libwww-perl I can not really imagine that porting it
to the new version should be that hard. If we want to prevent a
maintenance hell we should try to patch the file in question. This will
definitely save us some work and has teh additional advantage that at
some point in time Ensembl upstream will be thankful for our work.
> I am no longer involved in any of these packages and have handed over to my colleagues Will and Nick as you know, but Steffen Moeller might be able to help.
I had you in CC as somebody who was mentioned in libwww-perl-5.808
changelog. However, I was hoping for more detailed response from Nick
and Steffen who are just reading this list.
Thanks for your answer anyway
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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