Bug#510984: perl: reworking .ph files

[Niko Tyni]

Package: perl
Version: 5.10.0-19
Severity: wishlist

Quoting Brendan in an oldish mail:

> .ph files are an abomination which should go away.  h2ph does a
> reasonable job, but does screw up on occasion.
>
> I reduced the headers which were processed to the minimum I believed
> necessary (debian/headers) based on a grep of require lines in the
> Debian packages at the time, supplied patches to h2lp and did some
> post-processing (debian/fixheaders) to fix problems.
>
> This was mostly successful when I first made those changes, but
> subsequent versions of glibc introduced new and whackier syntax which
> defeated the h2ph parsing, in some instances only impacting certain
> architectures.
>
> My plan, unrealised to date, was to identify the specific constants
> users were interested in and to have a compiled program which
> generated a limited subset of the .ph files, removing the problems of
> trying to parse headers by punting to the compiler.  Something like:
>
>   #include <sys/ioctl.h>
>
>   int main()
>   {
>     /* ... */
>     printf("sub TIOCGWINSZ() { %d }\n", TIOCGWINSZ);
>     /* ... */
>   }

Filing a bug to document the plan. At least #379757, #416968,
and #505289 are related.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org