Bug#987615: perl-base: please ship modules used by usrmerge in perl-base

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2021 at 03:26:02PM +0100, Dimitri John Ledkov wrote:

> Please consider moving things that usrmerge & libfile-find-rule-perl
> use from per/perl-modules to perl-base.
> 
> Specifically please move:
> 
> Fatal.pm
> File/Find.pm
> Tie/RefHash.pm
> autodie.pm
> autodie/Scope/Guard.pm
> autodie/Scope/GuardStack.pm
> autodie/Util.pm
> if.pm

I note that all of these except File::Find are dual life:
they are also released separately upstream on CPAN.

We have a well working process for introducing separate packages of dual
life modules to Debian, mainly used when the CPAN versions are frequently
released and gain features that have not made it into the core versions
yet. We could use the same process to introduce separate packages of
the above modules, and limit their dependencies to just perl-base.
The separate packages can later be phased out easily when this one-time
need is over.

I think this would be a clean way to handle the issue.

As for File::Find, moving it to perl-base does not seem a huge
burden. It's just 22K after stripping POD documentation (as we
customarily do for the modules in perl-base) and seems unlikely to gain
new dependencies or functionality in the future.

Alternatively, building a separate libfile-find-perl binary package from
src:perl should also be doable.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org