Packages broken by perl 5.12

[Niko Tyni]

On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 08:52:49AM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Sat, May 07, 2011 at 07:49:30AM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> > Once a fixed version is in sid, please file a bug against perl to add a
> > Breaks: entry for earlier versions of mrtg. Otherwise partial upgrades
> > can still trigger the breakage.
> 
> Hmm. Should we make this a general recommendation? There are likely
> to be other cases of versions in squeeze breaking under perl 5.12
> which it would be nice to catch.

Yeah, seems like common sense to me. I added quite a few of them for
etch->lenny upgrades (5.8->5.10) due to missing perlapi-* dependencies,
see commit 9ddd6058da07be64cca49cbaf0d. (Those have all been fixed since,
so they aren't a problem this time.)

I don't really expect many squeeze packages actually breaking hard with
5.12, given how hard upstream works on backward compatibility. If we
get 5.14 in wheezy, it's possible that squeeze packages break more in
partial upgrade scenarios as we skip one round of deprecation warnings.

It remains to be seen how much havoc the -Duse64bitint change actually
causes. I suppose git-svn may be a candidate for Breaks if #587650
gets fixed.

> Perhaps a d-d-a when the transition is complete would be a good
> opportunity to do this.

Not sure if that's overdoing it but I suppose it doesn't hurt,
particularly if there's a d-d-a mail anyway.
-- 
Niko