perl: squeeze release, 5.12 transition, etc.

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 10:46:44AM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> Yeah. The main complication is that we need unofficial binNMUs of 
> the perlapi-* and libperl reverse dependencies so that they can be
> used as build dependencies for rebuilding the rest.
> 
> I've been using the scripts at
> 
>  http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-perl/scripts/perl-5.10-transition/
> 
> for determining the necessary binNMUs. I'll try to write up something
> about the process on the wiki page you set up (thanks!)

Thanks, I see you've done that.

> It would be good to have a shared public repository for uploading
> the binNMUs. I was earlier using 
>  http://people.debian.org/~ntyni/perl/
> but the alioth web space for the perl project would probably be better.
> I've found reprepro a very good tool for managing the repository.
> 
> Oh, and just in case you're already getting started: please consider
> using i386 instead of amd64 if possible; the use64bitint changes in 5.12
> are only effective on the 32-bit architectures so i386 should give better
> test coverage. (I think did a partial rebuild on i386 last year and only
> found one or two problems related to use64bitint, though.)

Okay, I'll try and kick this off now.

> The topgit usage in the perl package actually predates 3.0 (quilt).
> 
> I dislike having to check in debian/patches and keep it (semi-)manually
> updated alongside the actual code changes. Even worse is only managing
> debian/patches in the VCS and keeping the upstream code untouched,
> which is what the pkg-perl team does.
> 
> I think 3.0 (quilt) makes it possible to avoid the latter issue anyway.
> The topgit and git-dpm helpers are about avoiding the first one. I
> suppose I could live without such a system but it does feel "wrong" to me.

Yeah, I can see advantages and disadvantages on both sides, and I've
not come across anything I particularly liked either tbh. I'll have a
more detailed look at topgit since even if we change later, it'll be
useful.

> I see gbp-pq in git-buildpackage is yet another option, similar to git-dpm
> AFAICS. I haven't tried that yet.
> 
> FWIW, a relevant debian-devel thread starts at
>  http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/02/msg00087.html

Thanks for the pointer.

Dominc.

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