-=| Axel Beckert, 19.05.2014 01:22:21 +0200 |=- > Niko Tyni wrote: > > I think we only need to be concerned about upgrades breaking by > > vanished modules. Right. > While I agree here, I don't think the reason is valid: > > > That means one release cycle: once the separated packages are > > pulled in once, they will stay on the system even when the perl package > > drops the hard dependencies in the next upgrade. > > Not necessarily. If people use "apt-get autoremove" as commonly > advised by "apt-get install" in such cases, or if people use aptitude, > those packages get removed once the last dependency vanished. Exactly. Where 'dependency' is any of 'Depends', 'Recommends' or 'Suggests'. We could take care about the packages that need to add the separate packages to their (build-)dependencies. The question here is if we care about users who need the functionality that was in Perl core before and don't use official Debian packages for everything. My point is that either we have perl depend/recommend/suggest the separate packages forever, or we document the split in the release notes and remove that dependency post-Jessie. Note that the dependency may be gone even for Jessie, depending on how fast packages are fixed. The note in the Release Notes would mean that users of unstable will not notice the removal, but I guess this is a price to be paid. Bugging each and every upgrade with a NEWS.Debian entry seems like spam. 'perl-base' is ranked #1 in popcon. Hmm, perhaps add a NEWS.Debian entry and remove it before Jessie? (this starts to have too many moving parts :))
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