Bug#536384: perl-modules must depend on perl-base (= 5.10.0-24) or ship the changelog.Debian.gz

[Niko Tyni]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:13:26PM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 13, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Niko Tyni<ntyni at debian.org> wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 11:15:17PM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> >> I vote that we fix this "problem" by simply nailing the dependencies
> >> between perl-base/perl/perl-modules to an exact equivalence.  [...]
> >
> > I agree with you that this is a cure worse than the disease. Furthermore,
> > as Adrian stated, it has problems with binNMUs.
> 
> There are ways around that, have the perl package provide a name which
> maps to the debian version less NMUs (either by manually updating
> debian/control, or an automated process which removes bin NMUs from
> the version).

As binNMUs get an extra changelog entry compared to their arch:all
counterparts, all approaches that try to make them equivalent seem
fundamentally broken to me. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding you.
 
> Another alternative, certainly the simplest, would be to remove
> perl-modules entirely and have those arch-indep parts included in the
> perl package.  perl could transitionally provide perl-modules.  The
> packages versions of perl/perl-modules were never intended to be
> disjoint--the split was intended only to reduce redundancy in the
> archive.  Is disk sufficiently cheap theses days that we no longer
> care?

I find this suggestion somewhat appealing, particularly as it would
remove the dependency loop that people frequently complain about
(#527917 / #502455) and simplify major version upgrades.

The size of the packages is roughly
              package size    installed-size   
perl              5M               15M
perl-modules      3M               15M

so with ~15 architectures, the join would take on the order of 50
megabytes more mirror space per suite, altogether something like 200
megabytes.  That does sound a bit much, but OTOH it's less than .1 %
of the total archive size.

A quick count shows 116 packages in sid that have a versioned dependency
(build- or otherwise) on perl-modules. Those would have to be fixed
first unless we provided a transitional empty perl-modules package.

In any case, the join wouldn't solve the issue this bug is about
completely, as perl-doc also has an arch:all->arch:any symlink in
/usr/share/doc. It therefore seems to me that a possible perl/perl-modules
join is a separate matter and should not necessarily be coupled with
this bug.

I think removing the symlinks with maintainer scripts and separating 
the /usr/share/doc entries is the best course of action here.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org