[Pkg-perl-maintainers] [Bug 1707979] Re: No ack or ack-grep in artful.

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

William Ricker wrote:
> I note the packagers have patched the Makefile.PL to run the
> standalone tests against the library edition, since standalone edition
> is not distributed -- unclear to me if that was a Debian decision or
> Ubuntu?

Not shipping the standalone edition is a Debian decision and it's like
this for a long time, at least since I took over its maintainership
inside the Debian Perl Team in 2013. According to debian/changelog
it's like that since the second upload of (back then) ack-grep in
2007.

It just does not make sense to ship a packaged version of the
standalone version:

* That's just the library version with all required libraries
  appeneded: You don't need the same functionality twice.

* Maintaining such a standalone version is as painful as maintaining a
  package with a statically linked C program: You need to rebuild the
  package for every security update in any of its recursive reverse
  dependencies. You definitely _don't_ want that.

And accordingly I don't think that not building the standalone has any
relation to this issue.

> Perhaps the patch needs re-tweaking to work in latest
> If the package passes on Sid, is the problem isolated into Ubuntu
> re-packaging of either ack or autopkgtest ?

There is no diff from Debian to Ubuntu in ack according to the version
numbers on https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ack (*) -- so I also
think that the issue is in the way Ubuntu does autopkgtests, either in
their autopkgtest package or in their setup.

(*) Although there is not listed which version would have been in
    artful, so I can say that for sure. But according to
    https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/artful/+source/ack/+changelog it
    would have been 2.18-2 which is the same version as currently in
    Debian Testing and Unstable.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, Debian Perl Team member, Debian ack maintainer
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