General policy for updating perl in stable
Dear stable release team,
At the perl sprint in Hamburg, we discussed the possibility of
cherry-picking all relevant bugfixes from perl 5.24.4 into stretch.
We did something similar once before, I think in 5.14.2-21+deb7u1
(importing parts of 5.14.4) but I couldn't find the specific release
bug now.
In general I think we would like to more regularly imnport new stable
releases into Debian stable, as upstream have a very similar quality
bar to Debian here:
https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/perl/pod/perlpolicy.pod#MAINTENANCE-BRANCHES
Rather than actually import the new upstream release, we would propose
cherry-picking (hopefully using some automated machinery to minimise
the possibility of errors being introduced) all relevant patches - the
main omissions I would expect would be things relating to platorms that
Debian doesn't support, and ones bumping the version number everywhere,
which tend to be very verbose.
In addition to making the release process easier (a mini-transition of
a handful of packages is needed each time even a minor version bump of
perl happens) this would also make patches easier to review because
they would be smaller.
Would you be willing to blanket pre-approve updates of this sort in perl?
Thanks,
Dominic.
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