Using dist to build perl

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Hi Manoj,

We are planning to address some DFSG and practical concerns in the
current perl package[1] by build-depending on dist (with <!cross> of course)
and using the metaconfig tool from there, together with the perl
metaunits. As far as I can tell, dist is not used in this way by any
other Debian package (at least there are no reverse build-depends) so
we wanted to give you a heads up of our plans.

There is a fresh burst of attention to perl's use of dist at the Perl 5
hackathon at the moment, which will hopefully result in some improvements
to dist too.

Niko and I are both happy to help with the maintenance of the dist
package in Debian, of course. Do let us know if you perceive any
particular challenges in using the Debian packages in this way.

One thing is whether you have any plans to update to the changes in
upstream git in the past couple of years?

Thanks,
Dominic.

[1] <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762638>