Bug#735134: perl: rename(1) is ancient

[Stuart Prescott]

Hi Dominic,

One thing to be careful with here is that /usr/bin/prename is currently 
part of the Build-Essential set (dpkg-dev depends on perl). This means that 
there are a lot of packages with debian/rules that contain lines like:

    prename 's/\.py//' $(CURDIR)/debian/…/usr/bin/*

If the behaviour of rename/prename is going to change or the package 
providing it is going to change, then some care needs to be taken here. A 
list of packages using rename or prename in d/rules is:

http://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=path%3Adebian%2Frules+\t\s*p%3Frename\s

(with a couple of false positives by the looks of things)

> 2) Make libfile-rename-perl be Standard, to match perl, without adding
>    any dependencies.

So to pursue option 2 and take prename outside the build-essential set, 
either some checking and bug filing needs to be done, or follow the lintian 
strategy and add a test for use of rename/prename in d/rules and lintian is 
both the prod to encourage change and metric of progress. 

cheers
Stuart

-- 
Stuart Prescott    http://www.nanonanonano.net/   stuart at nanonanonano.net
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org/         stuart at debian.org
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