[Pkg-parrot-devel] Package for parrot-3.6.0 status - work in progress

[Allison Randal]

On 07/28/2011 06:01 PM, Dominique Dumont wrote:
> On Thursday 28 July 2011 16:11:29 Allison Randal wrote:
>> Great. Where can I get the latest Rakudo packaging to test that the
>> [perlapi] changes we make in the Parrot packages solve the problem for 
> Rakudo?
> 
> Latest rakudo provides only rakudo 0.1~2011.04. This one is available in 
> Debian unstable. 
> 
> On the other hand, the fix consists in making sure that parrot binary package 
> depends on perlapi-5.12.4 (matching the perl used to build parrot). So a 
> recent rakudo package is not required to progress on this topic.

perlapi is for XS modules, and dh_perl only adds perlapi-<version> if it
encounters compiled .so XS modules (read the source code for dh_perl).
But Parrot doesn't have any XS modules, and neither does Storable.

This is not the right fix.

What's actually going on is that Parrot is storing some configuration
variables in a plain-text format (what Storable writes). Some tools used
by Rakudo are then reading that plain-text format (using Storable to
read it).

The fundamental problem is that Storable was never intended to be used
for *persistent* data files. Even in Parrot, the usage of Storable is
supposed to be temporary during the build process. But, a few language
build tools designed to be used with a Parrot build directory are now
being installed. The real fix is to make all installed tools use the
parrot_config tool (which contains all the same data) instead of using
the fragile Storable text file. I'll move this bug upstream, it's not a
packaging problem.

Allison