Perl splitting

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Thu May 10 04:45:34 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 21:10 +0100, Jose Pedro Oliveira wrote: 
> Hi,
> 
> As I have been rather busy in the past months I haven't had the time
> to follow the mailing lists and only this weekend did I realize that
> the disruptive [1] change of splitting perl had been pushed through.
> 
> Questions:
Disclaimer: All answer are my personal view and opinion.

> 1) What exactly do we gain with such splitting?
- Smaller install size
- Smaller buildsys size
- Introduces real perl-module build-deps instead of a dependency on a
"lumped-together" meta-rpm (=> improved long term stability of perl
module packages)
- The option to upgrade/replace "core perl modules".

> 2) How did such a disruptive change got through Red-Eng as I haven't
>    seen it announced as a milestone for F7 ?
>    http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CategoryFedora7Features
rel-eng would have to answer.

> 3) Again how does this only gets committed this last weekend
>   (after the 4th test release)?
The split had been pending and discussed here for many weeks, but
progress on the perl package had been a snail. Some details had been
controversial, some details were broken, but 90% of the delays had been
caused by collaboration not working.

IMO, the currently split is only "half of the story" and far from being
complete.

> 4) How does a company plans to release a product with several
>    hundred packages broken (SRPMs that users won't be able to rebuild)?
Which harm does this to the Fedora run-time? It's a "grandfathering"
approach and it's actually not different from not performing an ordered
mass rebuilt.

> Thanks in advance for your time,
> jpo
> (a very concerned user/packager that sees lot of his scripts broken
> because of missing perl core modules and doesn't want to review all his
> specfiles in order to add perl core modules to the build requirements list)
It's much less effort than you expect.

1. In almost all cases you will see hard rebuild-breakdowns with obvious
"easy-fixes". In 90% of all cases all that would be required is to add
"BuildRequires: perl(ExtUtils::MakeMaker)" and (less frequent)
"BuildRequires: perl(Test::More)".

2. Such issues could easily be approached by a perl-SWAT team, but ...

3. It's a grandfathering approach. There is no need to rebuild
everything.

Ralf 




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