Bug#629472: Handle deprecated modules in 5.12 and 5.14

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Source: perl
Severity: wishlist

I'm making this a bug to make sure it doesn't drop off the radar,
since it's going to take a bit of monitoring and occasional action.

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 11:19:32PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 02:48:01PM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> > That still leaves the modules deprecated in 5.12 (Class::ISA,
> > Pod::Plainer, and Switch.) 
> > 
> > Any packages in squeeze using those will break if perl is upgraded to
> > 5.14 first, unless we leave a dependency in place for one release cycle.
> > 
> > Reviewing #580034, there are probably about 30-40 such packages. They
> > would make a rather long Breaks: list.
> > 
> > Not sure if just Recommending the separate packages is enough to
> > remove the need for Breaks: entries.
> 
> I don't think it is. If we're going to care about partial upgrades
> at all, we may as well make them work robustly, and turn those 
> relationships into Depends. I'm happy to do that for wheezy.
> Thanks for the reminder about that bug; the list of affected packages
> there is bigger than the list I've filed bugs for based on my
> rebuild logs. I've added a task to the wiki to check these again and
> file bugs where needed.

Done (mainly for Switch). Haven't done this for Shell since this won't
be removed until 5.16. They should all be tagged perl-5.14-transition.

Any objections to make raising the strength of the perl-modules
relationship to libswitch-perl and libclass-isa-perl to Depends for
5.14?

We'd need to make those packages Priority: standard before doing this.
Note that this would just be for the wheezy cycle, and could be dropped
afterwards.

> It may be that we can leave libpod-plainer-perl at Recommends of
> course (or for that matter drop it down to Suggests). 

Based on your analysis, there is no software in Debian using Pod::Plainer.
This suggests that the module is little-enough used that we could drop
the dependency on this one down to Suggests. Any objections?

> Yet to analyze: Devel::Dprof and Perl4::CoreLibs. Assuming that wheezy
> releases with 5.14 and not 5.16, if we catch all uses of these before
> wheezy releases, we won't need to add Depends in wheezy+1 (but this
> assumption may turn out to be invalid).

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email)