perl, perl-devel, and missing config.h

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 13:10 -0500, Michael Tiemann wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-03-05 at 12:18 -0500, Robin Norwood wrote:
> > However, one change has been pretty controversial.  In accordance with
> > standard Fedora packaging, he split the C header files into a
> > perl-devel package.  These files aren't needed to run perl modules,
> > but they are needed to build many perl modules, both in Core and
> > Extras.  Unfortunately, when I accepted the new spec file and built it
> > into rawhide, I didn't think through the consequences fully, and we
> > ended up breaking a lot of builds.  It was generally not very obvious
> > *why* the builds were breaking, leading to much frustration[2].
> 
> My $0.02: now that the reason is known, and known to be a direct
> consequence of Following The Specs, it seems to me that adding the 
> -devel requirement to packages that do, indeed, need -devel is The Right
> Thing.  I, for one, am always happy to see a more clear and clean
> distinction between the -devel and the non-devel worlds.

And fwiw, this parallels the fact that you now need python-devel
installed to build python modules (even if they're pure python).  

Jeremy