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Re: Bug#777597: perl-modules: upgrade regression: dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of perl-modules



(Dropping Sven and Andreas but adding the release team; there's a question
for you lower in the mail.)

On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 10:19:18PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:

> It looks like a bug in apt to me. The perl/perl-modules circular dependency
> has been around for ages and should be easy to break, but I suppose apt
> is trying to configure them in separate dpkg runs or something like that.
> 
> If it's actually reproducible this time (I haven't tried yet), that
> hopefully helps in understanding the issue. Sven Joachim's analysis in
>  https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=767734#10
> sounds good, but it doesn't quite fit here as that particular apt bug
> shouldn't be present in wheezy (or jessie, for that matter) at all.

FWIW I wasn't able to reproduce it on Wednesday or Friday, which is
a bit strange as Gregor said he could.

Apt maintainers: there's plenty of debug output in the log Andreas
supplied. Is that enough for you to understand the problem, or
would you like something more?
 
> Relaxing the circular dependency is a workaround that might be doable,
> even though it would be 'incorrect'. There are modules in perl that
> need others in perl-modules, and vice versa.  However, I count only 21
> binary packages in sid [1] that depend on perl-modules but not perl.
> As perl is transitively build essential (via dpkg-dev and libdpkg-perl),
> build dependencies should not be a concern at all.

There are a few packages that pull in perl indirectly through their other
dependencies, which brings the count of binary packages that only depend
on perl-modules down to 15:

  cli-common
  patcher
  polygen-data
  pristine-tar
  pure-ftpd-common
  rinse
  shorewall
  shorewall-core
  snort-common # not in jessie
  squid        # not in jessie
  tvtime
  mono-apache-server2
  mono-apache-server4
  mono-fastcgi-server2
  mono-fastcgi-server4
 
I haven't checked if these would actually be broken if the perl-modules
-> perl dependency was relaxed. Even if they wouldn't break, I would
very much prefer if they were fixed to depend on perl instead, to lower
chances of users encountering systems with perl-modules but not perl.

Release team: if we don't find another solution, would you be willing to
allow changes in these packages replacing
 Depends: perl-modules
with
 Depends: perl
into jessie?

(Unfortunately my Debian time will be quite scarce for the next week or so,
 so I won't be able to work much on this.)
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni@debian.org


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