Proposed F12 perl cleanups

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Mon Aug 17 08:02:25 UTC 2009


On 08/15/2009 09:00 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> Out of the thread on p5p, I'd like to propose the following changes for
> F-12:
>
> * Rename "perl-core" to "perl"
> * Rename "perl" to "perl-minimal"
>
> The biggest change here is that there are still packages which "Require:
> perl", usually to specify a specific minimal version. Here is a list of
> rawhide packages which do this:


> With this change, these packages will have a larger installation
> footprint, unless they're cleaned up. Instead of:
>
> Requires: perl
> or
> Requires: perl>  5.6.0
>
> They should either have:
>
> 1. If they're version dependent, they should have
>
> Requires:	perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_%(eval "`%{__perl} -V:version`"; echo
> $version))
>
> 2. If they're not, they could either accept the larger install
> footprint, or switch to:
>
> Requires: perl-minimal
>
> Thoughts on this?

-1

Rationale:

a) As others already pointed out, many of these "requires:" are 
automatically added => Part of the issue is inside of perl.req etc. and 
not inside of the perl package

b) "Requires: perl > XXXX" is intuitively understandable
("A natural solution" ), perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_..) isn't.

c) R: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_..) is not a natural replacement for
"R: perl > XXX". They have different semantics.

R: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_..) basically refers to module search paths, 
while "R: perl > XXX", can refer to many to subjects and may originiate 
from other issues, such as changes of the perl language, bugs a perl 
module author might have encountered, etc.

Example:
# rpm -q -requires help2man | grep perl
/usr/bin/perl
perl >= 0:5.005
perl(Getopt::Long)
perl(POSIX)
perl(Text::Tabs)
perl(locale)
perl(strict)

* There is no explicit "requires: perl >= ..." inside of this package's 
spec,

* The package actually doen't require a "perl-package >= 5.005", it 
requires "The Perl Language > 5.005"

* The package doen't install any module, so "perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_..)" 
isn't right either.


That said, I think, we need another rpm tag, besides "perl" and 
"perl(:MODULE_COMPAT..)" to denote "The Perl Language" version and let 
rpm add this in perl.req instead of "perl > XXX".


Ralf




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