Re: Bug#53794: docbook2man doesn't run at all (on examples)

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

reassign 53794 perl-base
severity 53794 important
retitle 53794 perl policy is flawed -- 5.004 and 5.005 simultaneous
thanks

>But wait, you're using 5.004, while this package is compiled for
>5.005.  That's why the perl version you're using can't find it.
>IIRC, Perl 5.005 is now the "standard" for Debian (but I could be
>way off here).  That's why we had this mess last summer when we
>were converting all the Perl modules to this version.

No, not true:

ii  perl-5.004      5.004.05-3     Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and Report
ii  perl-5.004-base 5.004.05-3     The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
ii  perl-5.005      5.005.03-4.1   Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and Report
ii  perl-5.005-base 5.005.03-4.1   The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister

I have both installed.

>> It kinda seems that this bug should be refiled against
>> libxml-parser-perl.
>
>I don't think this is gonna work.  How about "simply" upgrading to
>5.004?  Or is this not possible due to your boot floppies work?

Red herring.  But that gave me a thought:

<apharris@arroz:d> ls -l /usr/bin/perl
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           22 Jul  8 18:55 /usr/bin/perl -> /etc/alternatives/perl
<apharris@arroz:d> ls -l /etc/alternatives/perl
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           19 Sep 22 10:35 /etc/alternatives/perl -> /usr/bin/perl-5.004

I mean, I know I could fix my alternatives, but is that the proper
solution?  I don't think so...

  If the script does have very special needs such as a specific version
  of Perl then you'll need to use #!/usr/bin/perl-5.004 (I take 5.004 as
  an example but you should replace 5.004 by whatever old version of
  Perl you are needing) and you'll need to add a dependency to
  perl-5.004. If it does furthermore request some binary modules then
  you'll need to package thoses modules especially for perl-5.004
  instead of the latest Perl (being perl-5.005 or whatever else). Those
  modules packaged for old Perls will have to add the Perl version in
  their package name. For a module Foo::Bar, instead of calling the
  package libfoo-bar-perl you'll have to call it
  libfoo-bar-perl-5.004.

Yet why should a script which uses a module which requires a specific
version of perl itself have to depend on that specific version of perl
-- that's not a very maintainable dependancy chain, as the above
paragraph points out.

The fact is that our perl policy is messed up -- The
libxml-parser-perl module requires perl-5.005, but there is no
guarantee that /usr/bin/perl is actually perl-5.005 -- that is managed
by /etc/alternatives, thus, it is up to the user.

I've refiled this to perl-base.

.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>