Bug#636994: lintian: add check for deprecated perl libraries (was: #629472)

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sun, Aug 07, 2011 at 05:11:51PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

> Thanks for the response; I think you've convinced me that this would
> be the best approach, at least to start with.
> 
> You're correct that build-time deps will be caught by rebuilds, once
> the modules get removed. Ideally in this case we'd have all the
> packages fixed well in advance of that; we'd like to be able to drop
> them from wheezy+1 without worrying about partial upgrades breaking
> things. However, this isn't actually a concern for situations where
> the build fails.
> 
> I take your point about starting off with the check marked as
> experimental, although I would like this check to have the maximum
> input before wheezy freezes, so your planned released schedule for 
> lintian may affect whether I'd like to have that included or not.
> 
> I'm filing this as a wishlist bug without patch initially; I had a look
> at the lintian git repository and couldn't initially see where the best
> place to put such a check would be. If you can give me any hints about
> where to start, I'll do so :)
> 
> To make this bug report complete, here's a specification for the check:
> 
> check in all perl source files in binary packages not depending on
> libperl4-corelibs-perl for strings satisfying the following regexp:
> 
> /(?:do|require)\s+(?:'|")(?:abbrev|assert|bigfloat|bigint|bigrat|cacheout|complete|ctime|dotsh|exceptions|fastcwd|find|finddepth|flush|getcwd|getopt|getopts|hostname|importenv|look|newgetopt|open2|open3|pwd|shellwords|stat|syslog|tainted|termcap|timelocal|validate)\.pl(?:'|")/
> 
> Tag: uses-perl4-libs
> Severity: important
> Certainty: possible
> Experimental: yes
> Info: This package includes perl programs using obsoleted perl 4-era
>  libraries. These libraries have been deprecated in perl in 5.14, and
>  are likely to be removed from the core in perl 5.16. Please either
>  remove references to these libraries, or add a dependency on
>  "libperl4-corelibs-perl | perl (<< 5.12.3-7)" to this package.

I've now sent a possible patch to lintian to the BTS (but
forgot to CC perl at packages.debian.org):

<http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=636994#10>

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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