Bug#1093541: dist: warns with Perl 5.40: Old package separator "'" deprecated

[Niko Tyni]

Package: dist
Version: 1:3.5-236-1.1
Severity: normal
User: debian-perl at lists.debian.org
Usertags: perl-5.40-transition
X-Debbugs-Cc: perl at packages.debian.org

Apologies for the rather late report, but metaconfig
in the dist package issues lots of warnings since
we upgraded to Perl 5.40.

On current sid we get 298 warnings just with:

  $ metaconfig
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 101.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 101.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 102.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 102.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 104.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 104.
  Old package separator "'" deprecated at /usr/bin/metaconfig line 105.
  [...]
 
This looks unfortunately onerous to fix.

In `perldoc perldeprecation` there's this:

   Use of "'" as a global name separator
    Perl allows use of "'" instead of "::" to replace the parts of a package
    or global variable name, for example "A::B" and "A'B" are equivalent.

    "'" will no longer be recognized as a name separator in Perl 5.42.

but I believe the approach is being reconsidered, see

  https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues/22644

  https://github.com/Perl/perl5/pull/22675

Filing a bug to track this in any case.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org