dependency calculations
For us to have multiple versions of Perl installed, we have to have some
way of having multiple copies of perl installed while still allowing
perl to be used in maintainer scripts.
This shouldn't be a problem, since:
1) perl-base depends on perl5-base and
2) perl5-base is provided by the perl-5.\d+-base packages and
3) dependencies must be satisfied before configuring a package
4) essential packages are installed and configured in one swell foop.
To keep from causing more problems, I'd want to verify #4 and that
someone could say, "Yes, this works."
Actually, thinking about this more, it seems that with every issue of
the Perl packages, I need to issue perl-base so that due to it needing
to be configured, it would force the configuration of perl-5.\d+.base.
This works great as long as update-alternatives for perl is set to
auto. If it isn't then if someone has both perl-5.004-base and
perl-5.005-base installed and they have manual updates set to
perl-5.004-base, they lose if perl-5.004 is updated. I suppose I could
check to see if:
1) update-alternatives --display perl is set to manual and
2) There is more than one Perl installed and
3) the manual alternative currently points to the package we're
updating.
I could fail in my preinst if all three of these were true.
Hmm. I'm assuming that specifying Depends: perl-5.005-base | perl5-base
won't actually help here.
Finally, I suspect the snippet in perl-5.\d+-base is needed for the
reasons mentioned in the comment:
# perl isn't installed yet, so update-alternatives needs to be run 'by hand'
update=`which update-alternatives`
perl-5.005 ${update} --install /usr/bin/perl perl /usr/bin/perl-5.005 5005
But I'm not positive. Considering that we're not guaranteed to have
/usr/bin/perl right now, it seems the safer bet.
Finally a note about my absence. I've just about finished writing a
course on Perl. It's eaten me alive since I've had to keep up my normal
workload as well. I worked 153 hours in the second half of September
for example. It's not finished but its very close. I just needed a
break from writing and I'm giving myself this message as a reward.
Darren
--
<torin@daft.com> <http://www.daft.com/~torin> <torin@debian.org> <torin@io.com>
Darren Stalder/2608 Second Ave, @282/Seattle, WA 98121-1212/USA/+1-800-921-4996
@ Sysadmin, webweaver, postmaster for hire. C/Perl/CGI/Pilot programmer/tutor @
@ Make a little hot-tub in your soul. @
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