Bug#527917: please break circular dependency

[Holger Levsen]

package: perl
User: debian-qa at lists.debian.org
Usertags: piuparts piuparts.d.o

Hi Brendan,

thanks for maintaining perl!

As you'll know perl depends on perl-modules and perl-modules depends on perl, 
which is called a circular dependency, which sometimes breaks apt (not dpkg) 
in interesting ways.

See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=190558 for a quite good 
discussion of the problem.

It also effects piuparts testing, as you can see 
http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze/state-circular-dependency.html - piuparts 
only tests packages which dependecies were successfully tested and well, for 
circular dependencies this will never happen. (And the perl circular 
dependency is probably the one with the biggest impact.)

Whats wrong with making perl depend perl-modules and making perl-modules only 
recommend perl? (I do the same with the tuxtype and tuxtype-data packages, 
and tuxtype-data is also basically useless without tuxtype. You could look at 
the images, yeah ;-)


regards,
	Holger
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