Re: Perl 5.20 and CGI.pm deprecation/removal
On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 02:06:25PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 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
> 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.
Thanks, that's a good point.
In 5.20 there will still be a version of CGI.pm in the perl core
packages, but using it will generate warnings about installing the
separate package. I expect the perl package will Recommend (not depend
on) libcgi-pm-perl, so the warnings will get triggered for build daemons
and people ignoring recommendations.
Looking through build logs could find some of the uses, but in this
particular case I expect that there are for instance web applications
without a proper test suite which won't be caught.
Probably we should try to make a lintian check out of this (ideally
generalized to cater for other deprecations as well while at it.)
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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