where is perl 5.6?
Perl 5.6 was released on March 23rd. That's a full 7 months ago.
In the meantime, I as a perl programmer, who is also a Debian developer,
and who prefers to use what is in Debian, found myself falling behind.
I wasn't able to investigate the cool new stuff in perl 5.6. Some of it
is clearly stuff I can use in my programs to significantly improve them,
but if I do, I will not be able to put those improvements into my Debian
packages, since Debian still doesn't support perl 5.6.
There was plenty of excuse for nothing being done about packaging perl 5.6
for Debian while potato was in the freeze, but that has been no excuse for
1 and a half months now, and in that time I've not seen perl's maintainer
doing anything to get perl 5.6 into Debian. But just 2 days after
Debian's release, Brendan O'Dea stunned me by producing perl 5.6 debs that
dropped into a Debian system, and acted as the default perl without
breaking anything. Even better, they reverted the package name back to
"perl" (no more perl-5.005 unsightliness), and they have a very
intelligent way of using dependancies to deal with future changes in the
perl XS module API without requiring such ugly package names in the
future.
There's just one problem: They're still not in Debian, and I still
cannot make my packages use all the nifty new features of perl 5.6.
And I really don't understand why. I've seen almost no discussion of
them on this list, and I've seen no reaction from the perl maintainer at
all. Darren, are you still there? Doesn't anyone care about getting perl
5.6 into Debian?
--
see shy jo
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