Re: Changes to perl-base contents for 5.6.1

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> Specifially I would like to drop the following modules from perl-base:
> 
>   POSIX
>     This is huge, ~1/3 of the total size of perl-base.  While it may
>     be possible to move some or all of the autoloaded subroutines to
>     perl, I'd prefer to keep it together.

IIRC, debconf uses quite a bit of POSIX. Let's see..

joey@silk:~/debian/packages/debconf>grep POSIX -r . | manual-editing-by-me
./Debconf/Template.pm:use POSIX;
./Debconf/Element/Text/Select.pm:use POSIX qw(ceil);
./Debconf/Template/Transient.pm:use POSIX;
./Debconf/TmpFile.pm:   do { $filename=POSIX::tmpnam().$ext }

Well, less than I thought. I use it for locale stuff (setlocale), that 
wacky ceil thing (which I could easily rewrite to use int instead, I'm sure),
and some temp file things. I'd be glad to use a different temp file 
generator, if I could find one that let me specify an extention (this is
required).

>     I've seen some cases in dpkg where it is used for errno constants,
>     and have submitted a patch to use the Errno module instead.

        # I really dislike hard-coding 5 here, but the POSIX module sadly
        # does not let us get at the value of LC_MESSAGES in locale.h in a
        # more portable way.
        my $language=setlocale(5); # LC_MESSAGES

BTW, does anyone know a better way to do that?

>   Data::Dumper
>     This was principally included for debconf, which no longer uses
>     it.

You'll have to add a versioned conflicts on debconf (<< 0.9) though, or 
partial/incremental/in progress upgrades will sometimes break.

-- 
see shy jo