Perl 5.12

[Niko Tyni]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:45:23AM +0000, Chris Butler wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 11:39:13PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> > Help with perl maintenance would naturally be very welcome. Eugene has
> > helped out a lot, and we'd love to have more active comaintainers.
> 
> As someone listed in the alioth project, I feel I should de-lurk a bit..
> 
> Shortly after I responded to the RFH my laptop stopped working, which meant
> I had to cut down my contribution to Debian significantly. Thankfully I've
> now got a new one, so I expect to be able to start looking at perl again.

Glad to hear this!

> I reckon this sounds like a good plan. I'd like to help if I can - I'll try
> to have a look at the delta over the weekend if I get time. Recent messages
> on p5p suggest that we might see RC0 out fairly soon.

A couple of things I found in the perldelta document [1] that have
an effect on other packages:

- suidperl is finally gone in 5.12, so any reverse dependencies need to
  be fixed somehow. Currently sid has
    backuppc
    cricket
    gforge-web-apache2
    kdenetwork-filesharing
    sympa

- upstream is deprecating some dual-lived modules (Class::ISA,
  Pod::Plainer, Shell, Switch) modules by issuing warnings when they're
  used from the core directory (/usr/share/perl/5.12 for us) instead of
  the vendor one (/usr/share/perl5). Distributors may tailor the warnings
  to suit their needs.

  I haven't quite decided yet what to do with this. An option is to ignore
  it all for now and patch the deprecation warnings away. I believe we
  can just add Recommends: entries for the separate packages in 5.14
  when the modules are actually removed from the Perl core distribution.

  Input welcome.

> I would suggest it's probably unlikely that we'll be able to do a perl
> transition so close to a freeze. Although the freeze date hasn't really been
> set yet, unless it's significantly delayed I'd say we should probably look
> towards releasing squeeze with 5.10, with the view to getting 5.12 in at the
> start of the squeeze+1 cycle.

Agreed. Preparing for the 5.10 transition took several months to get
the most important build failures and the like sorted out first.

However, it would be nice to get a 5.12 package into experimental soonish
anyway (ideally even a release candidate if we can make it soon enough)
as it doesn't hurt anything and gives more data for the decision (like
a chance for mass rebuilds).

FWIW, specifics on 5.12 packaging that don't concern other packages should
probably be discussed on perl at packages.d.o (of which the perl-maintainers
list is a subset.)

[1] http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob_plain/refs/heads/blead:/pod/perl5120delta.pod
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org