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Perl Packaging Discussed, Altered
By Doug Caverly
Staff Writer
Article Date: 2009-09-29
A new argument relating to the definition of Perl has arisen, and, perhaps surprisingly, the involved parties didn't arrive at some sort of impasse (even one of the casual "you say tomay-to, I say say tomah-to" variety). Instead, the subpackages in the Fedora 13 (and RHEL 6) release timelines are due for a reworking.
Tom Christiansen started the debate after taking a look at Fedora 10. Apparently he noticed the absence of pieces including CPAN.pm, Text::Harness, and h2xs, and concluded, "Redhat no longer include(s) Perl v5.10 when you install their perl 5.10 RPM."
Christiansen then wrote, "The current Redhat definition of 'perl' is misleadingly broken, leading to confusion and error because they've got their meta-package definitions and instructions wrong."
Tom Callaway responded by explaining some of the reasons behind the split (which he's actually responsible for), and outlining four options for the future.
Finally, a Fedora Perl maintainer weighed in by stating, "[W]e're going to redo the subpackages in the Fedora 13 (and RHEL 6) release timelines so that there is:
perl: depends on all subpackages provided in upstream tarball
perl-minimum (or perl-base, we're still discussing): minimum perl footprint for 'base' functionality (e.g. no CPAN)"
It's interesting to see stuff get accomplished here so quickly; in many other fields, arguments and foot-dragging might have made this debate last months. Anyway, a big hat tip goes to Jonathan Corbet.
About the Author:
Doug is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest eBusiness news.
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