our perl-core on p5p

[Marcela Maslanova]

----- "Tom \"spot\" Callaway" <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:

> Okay, so with all of that said, let me discuss what would happen if
> we
> were to switch the naming of perl and perl-core tomorrow:
> 
> * Any packages which still have "Requires: perl" , rather than a more
> specific "Requires: perl(foo::bar)" would suddenly have a much larger
> installation footprint. (Thankfully, I think this is probably almost
> never the case in current Fedora as a result of many cleanups.)
> * New users who do not read the descriptions (which, unfortunately,
> are
> far more than those who do) and run: yum install perl, will get more
> perl modules than they possibly want or need. I realize that this is
> a
> hotly debatable point.
> * Existing users who are currently happy with the focused perl
> packages
> that they have installed (only those which are explicitly needed by
> dependencies) will suddenly get a lot more perl subpackages which
> they
> are not using upon the next update/upgrade. This leads to cries of
> "OMG
> BLOAT!!!1!".
> 
> I see four possible courses of action at this point:
> 
> 1. Go back to a monolithic perl. I do not like this option, and I
> would
> not recommend it.
> 2. Reword the descriptions to make it much clearer that the "perl"
> binary package, and the dependencies it has, is not the complete
> "core"
> as provided in the perl tarballs, it is simply the minimal necessary
> for
> /usr/bin/perl to run. (We probably want to do this anyways.)
> 3. Swap the perl and perl-core names, with the above results.
> 4. Rename perl / perl-core to something more obvious. We could
> convert
> what is now "perl" to "perl-minimal", for example, but what if
> someone
> runs "yum install perl"? What should they get? The minimal or the
> "everything in the tarball" experience? (When this split was first

Thanks for your explanation.
I was thinking about 3 or 4. We have time to decide because the best time
for this change will be perl-5.10.1 with rebuild all perl modules.

Regards,
Marcela Mašláňová