Re: Bug#1018687: override: perl-modules-5.34:libs/optional perl-modules-5.36:libs/optional
On Sat, Sep 03, 2022 at 11:00:31PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > On Sun 28 Aug 2022 at 09:28PM -05, Daniel Lewart wrote:
> >> Please change perl-modules-5.34 and perl-modules-5.36 from:
> >> * Priority: standard
> >> to:
> >> * Priority: optional
> >>
> >> perl 5.34.0 is Priority:standard" and Depends on perl-modules-5.34.
> >> perl 5.36.0 is Priority:standard" and Depends on perl-modules-5.36.
> >> Therefore, perl-modules-5.xx will still be pulled into Standard systems.
>
> I think the stronger argument here is basically that the perl-modules
> package is an internal implementation detail of the perl package, and
> therefore only the perl package should have the higher standard priority.
>
> I'm not sure it makes much difference in practice, and I'm curious what
> problem Daniel ran into that motivated filing a bug report, but I think
> that logic might make sense? But I'm also not sure we should make changes
> here just for the sake of making changes, so I'm curious about the
> motivation and what problem this change would fix.
Yeah, thanks. I agree on all this. My first thought was that the requested
change would be just cosmetic with no effect in practice.
However, there's one thing that occurs to me in favour of the change:
perl-modules-5.xx will currently stay installed after an upgrade to 5.yy,
but is probably not useful anymore on most systems [1]. I'm not sure
if the priority affects apt's inclination to remove orphan packages,
but it does seem like a possibly useful hint.
FWIW libperl5.xx is already Priority: optional and Depends on
perl-modules-5.xx. Making their priorities match does feel right to me.
[1] Coinstallability between Perl versions was requested so that packages
embedding a Perl interpreter (by linking against libperl5.xx) would
not be quite as tightly coupled during upgrades as they used to be. The
package doing the embedding can now be upgraded separately later, and
still has the Perl standard library available in the meantime because
the older versions of libperl5.xx and perl-modules-5.xx stay installed.
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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