Re: Perl disaster in the making
Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org> writes:
> 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.
Yeah, but there are also a *lot* of modules that would break---and
even pure-perl things like libwww-perl may depend on non-pure-perl
things like libdigest-md5-perl, so I wonder how much stuff would still
work reliably.
As far as the disruption: I maintain 15+ perl packages, I'm going to
be converting all of mine tonight and tomorrow, and then I'll probably
get some NMUs going on some other stuff I use but don't maintain
myself. That, plus Raphael's insane levels of helpfulness suggest
that it'll get sorted fairly quickly.
Darren and Raphael have done quite a good job figuring this transition
out, with the able assistance of a couple of prominent upstream perl
hackers. I think the pain will be merely temporary.
I think this is no worse than, and probably in many ways analogous to,
the libc4->libc5 upgrade, where we discovered the problems of having
had too-generic names for many packages that made it hard to have
multiple versions installed at once. We sucked it up, broke
everything once, recompiled a lot, and had it all sorted fairly
quickly. If we don't do it now with perl, we'll just end up doing it
later.
Mike.
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