Re: New perl packages

[cjw44@flatline.org.uk (Colin Watson)]

Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org> wrote:
>A corresponding revised policy document has been submitted to
>debian-policy, available at:
>
>  http://people.debian.org/~bod/perl/perl-policy.sgml

While the Perl policy is being revised anyway, is there any chance that
Perl module packages might start declaring the modules they provide and
the necessary dependencies in a similar manner to shared libraries?
Trying to use a control area file for this is probably not acceptable
(every language will want one :)), but perhaps packages could place a
file in /usr/share/perl5/depends/package and/or
/usr/lib/perl5/depends/package indicating respectively the
architecture-independent and architecture-specific modules they provide
and the corresponding dependencies that are needed.

This would make it very simple and reliable for e.g. debhelper and
lintian to automatically calculate and check dependencies on Perl
modules. There've been a few suggestions before, but they mostly seem to
have been semi-heuristic, and don't allow for the various nice things
that a shlibs-like policy would provide, like allowing Perl modules to
declare the minimum version required for backward compatibility.

The transition to such a policy would probably take some time, but I
wouldn't expect it to be traumatic, as the automatic dependencies would
only be used when available.

-- 
Colin Watson                                     [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]