Bug#721393: perl-modules: please describe which recommended/suggested packages are used for what

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 03:13:31AM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> perl-modules contains quite a few recommended/suggested packages
> since 5.18, and I think it would be appropriate to describe why/for what
> these are needed/used.
> 
> Cause if these were just modules that _might_ be "often" used, it's IMHO
> probably more appropriate to not recommend/suggest them generally, but
> rather let other packages depend upon them.

They are part of a deprecation cycle; they are modules currently part of
core, but the core versions now issue a deprecation warning and will be
removed from core in 5.20. See #702096 for full details. The recommends/
suggests are to ensure a smoother transition until packages have been
updated to depend on the separate packages.

This is mostly an implementation detail that users of the package
shouldn't have to worry about too much. Packages should still be
updated to depend on the separate modules. I half thought that we already
had a lintian check warning of these, but we only have one for the
perl4 libraries which were deprecated in the previous cycle. I think
we must have decided that it wasn't necessary for the other types of
deprecations, but I'm not sure why.