Bug#931730: libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl: build dependency cycle with libsub-identify-perl

[Niko Tyni]

Package: libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl
Version: 1.2.0-2
Severity: serious
User: debian-perl at lists.debian.org
Usertags: perl-5.30-transition
X-Debbugs-Cc: debhelper at packages.debian.org, debian-perl at lists.debian.org

Hi,

the recently added libmonkey-patch-perl dependency in
libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl has unfortunately resulted in a build
dependency cycle:

  libsub-identify-perl Build-Depends: debhelper 
   debhelper Depends: dh-strip-nondeterminism 
    dh-strip-nondeterminism Depends: libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl 
     libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl Depends: libmonkey-patch-perl 
      libmonkey-patch-perl Depends: libsuper-perl 
       libsuper-perl Depends: libsub-identify-perl

This is a problem for Perl major version transitions because
libsub-identify-perl is arch:any and needs to be rebuilt against the new
Perl, but its build dependencies will now be uninstallable until it is
rebuilt. We need to break the cycle.

I see this new dependency was introduced for normalizing zip archives
(#858431) by changing the Archive::Zip behaviour on the fly. Is this
fixable on the Archive::Zip side?

Alternatively, would it be possible to weaken the cycle somehow, for
instance by making this dependency optional and having the packages that
actually need it declare an explicit build dependency ?

Thanks for considering,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org