Re: Perl disaster in the making
Le Sun, Jul 04, 1999 at 04:09:30PM -0500, Steve Greenland écrivait:
> the unstable tree, but I think there are some big, unsolved problems in
> the way the change to versioned perls is being handled.
It's not an unsolved problem. It's a temporary unavoidable problem.
> 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
No ligtk-perl has been recompiled with perl-5.005 and depends on
perl-5.005, this is the right thing.
So when using dselect, it selects perl-5.005 and perl-5.005-base
which conflicts with perl. Which causes your troubles with the
not yet updated perl packages that do depends on perl.
> 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".
No it doesn't provide perl, since it conflicts with it ! He provides perl5
only.
> 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).
And apt-get upgrade would be just fine as perl-5.005 would not be
installed ... you'll only run into troubles if you
do a dist-upgrade ...
> 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.
If you do not want problems, do not install perl-5.005 until everything
has been updated. And no perl-5.005 cannot provide perl because
a package with a perl dependency may not work if perl is provided by
perl-5.005.
However you can install perl-5.004 safely. It does provide perl5 too
but do not conflict with perl so that your old packages do not need
to be removed.
This has been discussed many times before, here and in debian-perl, and
I think we're doing the right thing ... but it is a big changes which
involves many packages, so give us some time to complete the work.
Cheers,
--
Hertzog Raphaël >> 0C4CABF1 >> http://prope.insa-lyon.fr/~rhertzog/
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