Re: Challenges around Perl 5.20

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

gregor herrmann <gregoa@debian.org> writes:

> Today while reading
> https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/perl/pod/perldelta.pod#Module-removals
> I remembered/detected 2 small challenges as well:

> - CGI and friends are removed; CGI.pm is already packages separately
>   anway; where it gets interesting is that CGI::Fast, which was also
>   part of perl core,
>   + is split off into its own dist since CGI 4.0
>   + but is currently also in its own binary package libcgi-fast-perl,
>     produced by the perl source package
>   so we can't just package the new separate CGI::Fast as
>   libcgi-fast-perl.
>   I guess waiting for 5.20 (which probably will drop the libcgi-fast-perl
>   binary package) and making a somehow coordinated upload of
>   libcgi-pm-perl 4 (without CGI::Fast) and a new separate
>   libcgi-fast-perl should be enough? (With getting versions right et
>   al.)

This is going to be a rather significant transition at the point at which
perl stops depending on libcgi-perl.  I have tons of packages that use the
CGI module without declaring any explicit dependency except on perl, and
I'm sure I'm not the only one.  This is going to be much higher-profile
than most of the module removals.

Even packages that don't contain CGI scripts often make undocumented use
of CGI::escape.  They really should use URI::Escape, but there's always a
tendency to prefer core modules to avoid dependencies on other modules.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>