Re: Old proposal regarding naming of Perl module packages

[Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com>]

Hi:

I'm curious about this bug report:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=114920 which didn't
reach a consensus. I'm not challenging the previous discussion, since
that discussion wasn't going much of anywhere.

I'm mostly just curious about modules which have ::Perl as the last
part in the name.

Namely, consider:
Modern::Perl packaged as libmodern-perl

But:
File::Find::Rule::Perl packaged as libfile-find-rule-perl-perl

Note that the second one couldn't be packaged any other way, because:
File::Find::Rule packaged as libfile-find-rule-perl

The whole virtual packages idea seems like sort of a mess, because we
have enough trouble with dual-lifed Perl modules (it's my
understanding that is due to how the virtual packages are defined by
perl-modules, but I could be mistaken). Also, it should be noted that
while users install "modules" via the CPAN shell (CPAN.pm), in
practice they are really installing the upstream provided CPAN
packages. What happens is installing a module (cpan -i HTML::Entities)
causes the appropriate package, HTML-Parser, to be installed.

I'm guessing the latter idea can be solved relatively easily by
providing users with an easy-to-use interface to searching for
modules. In the pkg-perl team, we use dh-make-perl --locate, and I
know apt-file serves a similar purpose, though I don't think most
users will have those installed on their machines.

Cheers,

Jonathan