Bug#781120: perl: handling of non-readable directories on @INC
Package: perl
Version: 5.20.2-2
Severity: serious
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-perl@lists.debian.org
Bug #780830 against spamassassin highlights a 5.18 change in
handling non-readable directories on @INC.
In wheezy (Perl 5.14), 'require' (and therefore 'use' as well) would
skip such entries when searching for modules. The current jessie (5.20)
behaviour will croak on them:
% perl -I/root -e 'require strict'
Can't locate strict.pm: Permission denied at -e line 1.
This may have unfortunate effects if site directories in /usr/local
are not world readable for some reason. The #780830 reporter
had at least one such directory (/usr/local/lib/site_perl), but
it's currently unknown where that came from.
It seems possible to me that /usr/bin/cpan has at some point created such
directories in some configurations, but I haven't really investigated
this. If somebody has non-world-readable @INC directories in /usr/local
and can trace their origins, reports would be welcome. Cc'ing the
debian-perl for likely candidates.
Backporting upstream commit
http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commit/e2ce0950e5e4b86c6fcbc488c37dd61d082b3e0d
from 5.21.7 would help a bit as it improves the diagnostics in the
error message by reporting the name of the directory missing permissions.
I'm inclined to add this for jessie but I'd welcome other opinions on this.
Mentioning this in the release notes might also make sense.
Filing as 'serious' for now as I suppose this can be considered a regression
from wheezy.
See also related upstream discussion at
https://rt.perl.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=123795
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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