Bug#656242: perl: .packlist file missing

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 07:04:23PM +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> Neither perl, perl-base nor perl-moduels contain the .packlist file that is part
> of a standard perl installation.
> 
> This file is needed when programs want to know which files belong to the
> perl core, and which don't.

Can you give an example of a program which uses it like this?

> To reproduce, use:
> 
>    perl -e 'do ".packlist"'
> 
> on a working perl, this should cause lots of compiletime errors (Bareword
> missing...) because the .packlist file is not valid perl.

This isn't a great test case.

> On debian, because it is missing, you get no output.

Right. As far as I can tell, the packlist system is intended to tell
you about manually/installed perl modules, which the Debian packaged
ones obviously aren't.

The problem with trying to change this is that without any sort of
specification or general information about this file format (which I
have failed to find) or a use case, it's pretty difficult to know exactly
what should happen.

I note that /usr/lib/perl/.../.packlist is explicitly removed in the
debian/rules file at the moment (as being cruft), and the documentation
has been updated accordingly:

http://patch-tracker.debian.org/patch/series/view/perl/5.14.2-6/debian/no_packlist_perllocal.diff
http://patch-tracker.debian.org/patch/series/view/perl/5.14.2-6/debian/instmodsh_doc.diff

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