Upgrading perl 5.26 removes xorg and other packages

[Niko Tyni]

On Sun, Jun 18, 2017 at 01:37:42PM +0700, nessento at openmailbox.org wrote:
> $ sudo apt install perl -t experimental
[...]
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   console-setup console-setup-linux debconf-i18n dictionaries-common
> iamerican ibritish keyboard-configuration liblocale-gettext-perl
> libtext-charwidth-perl libtext-iconv-perl libtext-wrapi18n-perl nodm
[...]

Hi, this is expected behaviour. Perl changes its binary interface between
major releases, so XS modules like liblocale-gettext-perl need to be
rebuilt. The package dependencies are designed to ensure compatibility,
so the old builds are not installable together with the new perl, and this
apparently ripples out to make bigger packages such xorg uninstallable
as well.

Unfortunately this means it isn't easy to test perl from experimental
without rebuilding those modules manually.

We do currently provide an unofficial test repository of rebuilt packages
at <http://perl.debian.net/>, but please note that those should only be
used on test systems and we provide no guarantees or support for them.

Hope this clarifies,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org