Hi -perl and -release, I've been working on things related to Perl 5.12.0, and I thought it's about time for an update. The versions in experimental have settled on a stable ABI now. I ended up enabling 64-bit integers on all architectures, but I don't expect that to affect many packages in practice. We don't seem to have armel and hppa experimental buildds running, but I've successfully built 5.12.0~rc3-1/hppa and 5.12.0-2/armel on the porter machines. (The mips 5.12.0-2 failure is timing dependent and I'm rather surprised it got triggered. A give-back would most probably succeed.) Upstream is releasing 5.12.1 in the next few days. It's a bugfix release with minor changes. I intend to upload it into experimental quickly when it's released. I expect 5.10->5.12 to be a smaller change than 5.8->5.10, and my rebuild tests seem to support this. The bugs relevant to this transition that I'm aware of can be seen at http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?users=debian-perl@lists.debian.org;tag=perl-5.12-transition which currently shows about 20 FTBFS bugs with 5.12.0, many of them trivial. (I have rebuilt ~2150 packages against different configurations and release candidates of 5.12.0 on amd64 and x86; broadly those with names matching /perl/ or linking against libperl. I'll redo this with 5.12.1 when it's ready.) Archive-wide, worst blockers for the transition that I know of are - #581268 / #578547 : libdata-alias-perl breaks and has a big number of reverse dependencies via libdata-visitor-perl - #578628 / #580328 : libregexp-copy-perl breaks and makes much of the Catalyst suite uninstallable via libhtml-formfu-perl - #578814 : perl-tk breaks and has a big number of reverse dependencies (already fixed upstream in development releases) (BTW, I don't have a good tool to list all recursive reverse dependencies and build dependencies. Any suggestions?) Given all the above, I think it would be possible to get 5.12.1 in Squeeze without severe delay effects on the release, as long as the worst blocker issues are resolved somehow. However, staying at 5.10.1 and leaving 5.12 or 5.14 for the next release is also fine by me. (Upstream now plans to do yearly major releases.) Upstream support is probably going to be better for 5.12.1, but I doubt there's much difference with security related issues. Ubuntu just released their long time support version with 5.10.1, so we'd be in the same boat for better or worse. OTOH, the Fedora people seem to be working hard to get 5.12 in. One complication with going for 5.12 in Squeeze is that I intend to be unavailable for much of the summer. While I'm sure there are plenty of people around who can patch the perl package in times of dire need, it would probably be good to have somebody nominate themselves as a backup. (My schedule is not set in stone yet, but let's discuss that in private if necessary.) Release team, please let me know what you think. -- Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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