Bug#704480: dh-make-perl: Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/share/perl5/Debian/Dependency.pm line 157.

[Robert Norris]

On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 10:52:18PM +0300, Damyan Ivanov wrote:
> Fixed in Git. Thanks for the excellent analysis!

Great, thanks!

> Now, about this one:
> 
> > + Module::Build >= 0.40 found in libmodule-build-perl ( 0.40) 
> > | perl-modules ( 0.40)

I would depend on perl-modules >= (currently installed version), and
nothing more. Its reasonable to assume that the user has that version
available, and will guarantee that it works on this system.

It might be that an earlier version of perl-modules would also be
suitable, but if there's no good way to determine that on the spot then
we have to live with it. It might suck a bit more for packagers (rather
than people just using dh-make-perl locally to get packages that don't
ship with Debian), but as a user I'm happy to transfer complexity to
people who have the knowledge and resources to deal with it properly.

The alternative would just be to list perl-modules without a version,
and expect that its probably going to be right most of the time. If its
not then the package build is going to fail in other places when the
perl build/test notices the versions are too old.

Depending on libmodule-build-perl seems somewhere between redundant and
plain wrong, as there will never be a properly-constructed package of
that name that is actually installable without conflicts. The other
option would be perl-modules listing versioned Provides:, but I don't
think that's possible?

Cheers,
Rob.