Bug#649177: Add breaks on update-inetd when #649174 is fixed

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Package: perl-base
Version: 5.14.2-5
Severity: serious
Justification: maintainer

On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 02:14:05PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote:
> There are a few situations where it's possible for update-inetd to be
> called in the middle of an upgrade from one Perl major version to the
> next: for example, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/862129 turned out to
> be a case where the samba postrm was called in such a situation.  If
> that happens, then any modules provided by the perl-modules package will
> be unavailable.  This includes File::Temp and File::Copy, both of which
> are used by update-inetd.
> 
> It would be very helpful for update-inetd to work even when only
> perl-base is available.  I appreciate that this requires slightly more
> complex code, but it would make the whole system more robust during
> upgrades.
> 
> Here's a suggested patch to implement this.  It implements fallback
> versions of the 'tempfile' and 'move' functions if the module versions
> are unavailable.  These will be a bit slower since they involve calling
> external programs, but at least the complexity is all kept up in the
> part of the code that imports modules rather than polluting the main
> body of DebianNet.pm.
> 
> I've tested this by performing an upgrade from Ubuntu oneiric to precise
> (which involves an upgrade from perl 5.12 to 5.14), pausing it
> immediately after perl-base is configured, and then running update-inetd
> --add and --remove.  Without this patch, it fails with "Can't locate
> File/Temp.pm in @INC"; with this patch, it behaves as expected (and
> strace output looks sensible as well).
> 
> Making this truly robust will probably also involve having perl-base
> declare Breaks on versions of update-inetd prior to this patch being
> applied.  I've CCed perl at packages.debian.org in case they'd like to
> comment on this.

Only that I think that I ought to hold off on adding more Breaks
for a little while longer, otherwise I risk an explosion in the number
of small updates to perl. I was in two minds about whether to upload
5.14.2-5 straight away or whether to wait..

Cheers,
Dominic.

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