Packages broken by perl 5.12

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 10:17:02AM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 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.

That's a really good point. We need to keep a close eye on packages
being fixed for deprecations in 5.12 which turn out to be fatal in
5.14 (I haven't digested all of current perldelta yet to know if there
are any examples of this)

> 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.

I suggested downthread that this could be a general 'bits from the
perl maintainers'; I've now added a section at the bottom of
<http://wiki.debian.org/PerlMaintenance> about this, to which I
invite contributions.

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