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

[Niko Tyni]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 11:15:17PM +1000, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
 
> I strongly disagree that this is a serious violation.  Completely
> omitting the changelog is a serious violation.  There being the
> possibility of a slight difference between perl/perl-modules is hardly
> so, and for a working package in the stable distribution the intent is
> that there be no difference.

Not all policy violations are serious bugs, and I believe the line is
ultimately drawn by the release team.

> For the sake of preventing further Policy lawyer bugs of this variety,
> I vote that we fix this "problem" by simply nailing the dependencies
> between perl-base/perl/perl-modules to an exact equivalence.  This may
> render perl un-installable in unstable at times for some
> architectures, but heck the most important thing is obviously sticking
> to the letter of Policy, so let's do it.

I agree with you that this is a cure worse than the disease. Furthermore,
as Adrian stated, it has problems with binNMUs.

I think having apt-listchanges fail because of our policy violation is
a real problem and not just policy lawyering (unlike #522827, which I'm
happy to have as wontfix.)

I also think having the copyright information from a different source
tree is potentially a much bigger problem than the changelog one. However,
I suppose that could be worked around by bumping the dependency whenever
debian/copyright changes (so it would currently be at (>= 5.10.0-20)).

Another difference with #522827 is that perl-modules
doesn't directly depend on perl-base, which is where
/usr/share/doc/perl/{copyright,changelog.Debian.gz} reside, so automatic
copyright extractors and the like need to traverse the dependency tree
further than the first level. That's easily fixable of course and as
such doesn't really affect this discussion.

All that said, your vote certainly weighs more than mine in this context,
so feel free to go ahead and do what you think is the right thing.

I'm not very eager either to add maintainer scripts juggling the
/usr/share/doc symlinks. Can we even trust that all systems have
/usr/share/doc/perl-modules -> perl, or could things like the old /usr/doc
transition have left different details on systems with a long history?

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org