Bug#710500: Mention removal of libdigest-sha1-perl (covered by Digest::SHA in perl core)
Package: release-notes
Tags: patch
Hi Michael
For reference, this is from http://bugs.debian.org/594273#54
On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 03:11:06PM +0400, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> I'm not sure it is the right place - the RM bugreport -
> to add this information to.
>
> The thing is: finally, wheezy is out without this module.
> And it turns out that many 3rd-party code still uses the
> old name, despite the new name being in core perl for
> quite a while.
>
> In particular, when upgrading postgresql.org to wheezy,
> this change (removal of Digest::SHA1) was one of the main
> issues, significantly bigger than all other together.
> There were about 40 modules/programs which used the old
> name, which all, at the same time, stopped working, and
> it tool quite some efforts to figure it all out and to
> make it all work again.
>
> This pain could be reduced significantly by one of at least
> two ways:
>
> 1. By documenting the fact that this module is no longer
> available, somewhere in release notes or something like
> that. One of the issues faced was complete lack of any
> information about this, and even searching does not reveal
> anything useful easily (google finds oldstable package but
> not this removal request).
This sounds like a good plan as libdigest-sha1-perl was nevertheless
still widely used. Attached is the patch proposed to apply to the
release-notes.
> 2. By providing a compatibility layer, a tiny wrapper that
> just maps one namespace into another. I don't remember how
> this works in perl, but I guess it should be more or less
> trivial to do - so that old Digest::SHA1 name still works
> (maybe printing some deprecation warning or something).
>
> Either as an additional package (maybe using the same old
> name - libdigest-sha1-perl), or within core perl itself.
IMO not the right approach as the aim was really to drop the use of
the obsoleted Digest::SHA1. But adding a release-notes entry is surely
more than worth.
Regards,
Salvatore
Index: release-notes/en/upgrading.dbk
===================================================================
--- release-notes/en/upgrading.dbk (revision 10171)
+++ release-notes/en/upgrading.dbk (working copy)
@@ -2002,6 +2002,19 @@
url="&url-wiki;Drupal/Upgrade/From6To7">the Debian Wiki</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
+ <listitem>
+ <para>
+ The <systemitem role="package">libdigest-sha1-perl</systemitem>
+ package is no longer available. Most of the functionality is
+ provided by <literal>Digest::SHA</literal> in Perl core in the package
+ <systemitem role="package">perl</systemitem>). See bugreports
+ <ulink url="http://bugs.debian.org/594273";>#594273</ulink> and
+ <ulink url="http://bugs.debian.org/591091";>#591091</ulink>. For third-party
+ applications not provided in Debian it is usually enough to substitute
+ the use of <literal>Digest::SHA1</literal> with <literal>Digest::SHA</literal>
+ in the corresponding source code.
+ </para>
+ </listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
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