Re: WARNING! New Perl/Perl-base upgrade removes 141 Sid/Unstable packages
On Wed, 28 Sep 2016, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> As a general rule, I find that using Debian packaging for perl makes
> absolutely no sense - and often problematic.
There is pretty much a 1:1 mapping from CPAN packages to Debian
packages. The only thing which is even remotely complicated is how perl
itself is packaged, because many things link against perl, and when the
perl API and/or ABI change, they all have to be rebuilt.
> Perl has its own ecosystem (cpan) that does an incredibly good job of
> packaging, updating, and dependency management. Mixing and matching
> that with Debian packaging, and expecting packagers to keep up with
> updates to lots of different perl modules, is just a recipe for
> disaster.
We have a perl team which handles this pretty effectively, actually, and
has tools to automate the updates to hundreds of CPAN modules.
It also works much better than CPAN when you're deploying to production,
as you can:
+ reproduce the production environment
+ don't have to deal with having compilers, etc. in production,
+ have security support
+ have long-term support
and indeed, if you need something from CPAN which isn't packaged, that's
literally just a dh-make-perl --cpan Foo::Bar; away.
--
Don Armstrong https://www.donarmstrong.com
If you wish to strive for peace of soul, then believe; if you wish to
be a devotee of truth, then inquire.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
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