Re: Bug#677865: Re: Bug#677865: dpkg-gencontrol warns about 'File::FcntlLock not available'

[Niko Tyni <ntyni@debian.org>]

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 05:54:26PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-05-16 at 11:05:35 +0200, Jens Thoms Toerring wrote:
> > > Long term what I think would be best would be to get File::FcntlLock
> > > into the perl core distribution, preferably upstream, but I'm not sure
> > > how such proposals are handled there and if something like that would
> > > be feasible, Jens what do you think? And/or would that be possible in
> > > Debian, maybe in the interim or regardless of perl core upstream?
> > 
> > I've never considered trying to get this module included into
> > the Perl core distribution (and I also wouldn't know how to
> > get started with something like that;-)
> 
> I'd assume a proposal needs to be sent to perl5-porters? But I've
> skimmed a bit over its archives, and I don't see anything obvious
> there. The debian-perl folks will know most probably.

I'm not aware of any documented process for this. The perl5-porters
list is certainly the right place to bring it up.

Generally, I think the aim is to make the core leaner so the bar probably
is (or at least should be) quite high. OTOH at least IO::Socket::IP did
make it in relatively recently.

I'm not very enthusiastic about including it as a Debian specific
bundling, but I'm not ruling that out totally.

> > Unfortunately, I also
> > don't see any way to do things without XS since the flock
> > structure that must be passed to fcntl(2) can be quite dif-
> > ferent on different systems, both concerning the number and
> > ordering of its members as well as the sizes of them:-( I
> > would love to hear ideas on how to do it differently, i.e.
> > with Perl-only methods!

Would it be possible to probe for the contents of the flock struct with C
code at build time, and then use that information to write out a pure perl
module that regenerates the structs at run time (probably with pack())?

It would still be architecture dependent (and thus go in
vendorarch/sitearch) but it wouldn't need a rebuild across Perl upgrades.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni@debian.org