perl: squeeze release, 5.12 transition, etc.

[Niko Tyni]

Hi folks,

now that squeeze is released (yay!) I thought I'd write a status mail
about the perl packaging.

As TopGit doesn't offer an easy way to manage multiple development branch
structures in one repository, I've copied the current perl.git over to

 git://git.debian.org/perl/perl-squeeze.git

and set the master branch there to point at 5.10.1-17. This should be
used for future squeeze updates (security and otherwise.)

I've also just uploaded 5.12.3-1 to experimental and pushed it to

 git://git.debian.org/perl/perl-5.12.git

I probably won't merge 5.10.1-17 there, as the relevant CGI.pm security
fixes were also included in 5.12.3.

If we do any 5.10.1 changes before the 5.12 transition, those should go
to the "normal" repository at

 git://git.debian.org/perl/perl.git

As for the 5.12 transition, I'm afraid real life is currently leaving me
even less time than earlier for Debian work so I haven't really planned
any schedule. If anybody else wants to coordinate this, I'm happy to
help with the details.

Otherwise, I'll try to set up a rebuild environment again and see where
we are with the FTBFS bugs and the like. While the rebuilds themselves
don't really require much developer time, I fear I can't be very fast
at sorting through the rebuild logs and filing relevant bugs.  I suppose
this task could be distributed quite easily if there are volunteers.

Upstream is preparing to release 5.14 in a few months, so I guess it
would be possible to skip 5.12 altogether. The release team might like
this, as a major perl transition causes a lot of work for them.

Finally, about the packaging: I'm not really thrilled about TopGit and
I've briefly looked for alternatives. The git-dpm package caught my
eye, it's quite nice and simple to use. It doesn't keep history for
each patch/branch, but I'm willing to live with that. However, I do
like the current system of generating patchlevel.h (see perl -V) from
debian/patches, and I haven't found a way to hook this into git-dpm.

If anybody wants to get rid of the TopGit even more than me, help and
suggestions would be welcome :)

Cheers,
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org