Bug#851506: cpanminus embeds other modules in fatpacked library

Damyan Ivanov dmn at debian.org
Sat Nov 18 20:16:30 UTC 2017


Control: found -1 1.7040-1
Control: severity -1 serious

-=| Dominique Dumont, 15.01.2017 19:59:44 +0100 |=-
> cpanminus embeds convenience copies of other modules.
> 
> Outside of Debian, fatpacking other modules with cpanminus makes sense
> to help users install this tool (which is a package manager). THis
> avoid a catch22 issue.
> 
> BUt in Debian context, all required modules are available as Debian
> packages and are installed with apt. So the fatpacked modules are
> needlessly duplicated.
> 
> Providing cpanminus without fatpack can be done by either:
> - removing fatpacked part from the cpan tarball
> - create debian package from upstream git repo (where fatpack
>   is not yet done, even if this repo contains convenience
>   copies of the modules).

What the current package does is to remove 33 unneeded fatpacked 
modules from the installed script (in bin/). (see debian/rules at [1])

 [1] https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-perl/packages/cpanminus.git/tree/debian/rules

However, these aren't all the fatpacked modules. App::cpanminus::* 
modules are also fatpacked.

Note that before version 1.7040, the fatpacked modules look like 
a mere copies of the original source. Since 1.7040 they have their 
white-space compressed, making them much less of a useful "source" and 
more like a minified javascript.

What do others think? I am raising the severity to 'serious', but if 
you disagree, please revert.


-- dam
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