[Fedora-packaging] perl module MODULE_COMPAT

[Ville Skyttä]

On Fri, 2005-04-01 at 03:02 +0800, Jeff Pitman wrote:
> On Thursday 31 March 2005 17:07, Warren Togami wrote:
> > Requires: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_%(eval "`%{__perl} -V:version`"; echo
> > $version))
> 
> What about Requires: perl(abi) = 5.8 or whatever?  Similar in the vein 
> of how Python packages are being put together.  :MODULE_COMPAT_ seems a 
> bit overkill.  Maybe I'm not seeing the whole picture, but it'd be nice 
> to have some consistency even between different module-based 
> interpreted languages.

Agreed in principle, but IMO hardly worth changing unless it's done
automatically by rpmbuild, like it does for Python in Rawhide/FC4tX.
This provision was added there specifically for the purpose of being the
official interface for depending on a specific ABI-compatible version of
Perl.  Such interfaces cannot obviously be changed without good reasons
and a deprecation period.

:MODULE_COMPAT_* may not be eye candy, but it is there (and was there
before Python got a similar one), does what it's intended to do, and
masses of specfiles depend on its presence.  IIRC cpanflute2 also adds
those dependencies nowadays, so some tools would need fixes too, not
only existing packages, if it went away.

OT: ISTR the ruby package lacks this kind of "abi" provision, yet it has
site-* in similar manner as python and perl packages.