Draft mail to debian-release

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Here's a message I'm planning on sending to debian-release at some point
soon. Any comments before I send this on? Do you agree with my rationale
for wanting to go via 5.12 (deprecation warnings)?:

Dear Release team,

I would like to register an interest in carrying out a perl transition
soon. This would be to perl 5.10.1 to 5.12.x (x = 3 currently). This
transition has already been in preparation for some time, and I think
we are in a good position to schedule this now. This is the first major
transition I've been involved in (I've recently become a co-maintainer
of the perl package), so please bear with me if I miss anything out.
You can see the transition tracking bugs at [1].

One possibility that we have considered is missing 5.12 altogether and
moving straight to 5.14, which is due to be released in a few months[2],
but my current thinking is that it's better to push 5.12 into unstable
soon, since it includes a number of deprecation warnings which would ought
to be aired in unstable at least for a short while before dropping 5.14
in (some of the things being deprecated will be removed altogether in
5.14).

I can't tell at this stage how long it will be until 5.14 is ready for
unstable, of course, but I would expect it to be a minimum of a month or
so after release, and probably a fair bit longer, based on the current
transition.

I do realise that you may prefer to skip a transition in order to reduce
the number of transitions, but I think that the approach I've outlined
above is safer.

As before, we can help by providing a list of packages to binNMU (as
of last weekend, when I did all of those, this was 444 packages).

I would be greatful if you could let me know what your general thoughts
on the issues are, and which option you'd prefer. I think we would be
ready for an upload to unstable in two weeks or so.

Thanks,
Dominic.

[1] <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=perl-5.12-transition;users=debian-perl@lists.debian.org>
[2] <http://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/Porting/release_schedule.pod>

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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