Perl disaster in the making
I realize that this is completely unintentional, and that we are in the
middle of a fairly big change in the Perl situation, and that it *is*
the unstable tree, but I think there are some big, unsolved problems in
the way the change to versioned perls is being handled.
To wit: libgtk-perl picked up a dependency on perl-5.005 (apparently in
addition to "perl (>= 5.004-05)". This causes dselect to auto-select
perl-5.005, wich causes perl-5.004 to be de-selected, which then
attempts to uninstall the 50% of my system that depends on "perl",
apparently because perl-5.005 doesn't provide "perl".
Luckily, I was using dselect and got the dependency resolution screen
and was able to undo the damage, but I have no idea what an "apt-get
upgrade" would do, and I'm not willing to experiment (ok, I remember
the '-s' option and gave it try, and it appears to DTRT by holding back
libgtk-perl).
Anyway, a warning to you following the unstable tree: be very observant
in your use of dselect while the perl changeover is resolved. To the
perl maintainer(s): why can't perl-5.005 provide perl? I understand that
this would (possibly?) cause problems with some of the modules, but
there are a *lot* of packages that just need the perl interpeter, and
could live quite happily with anything perl-like.
Steve
Reply to: