perl 5.18 progress

[Russ Allbery]

Niels Thykier <niels at thykier.net> writes:
> On 2013-05-20 01:54, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> Be aware that Perl 5.18.0 includes podlators 2.5.1, which means that
>> pod2man now exits with an error by default if there are POD syntax
>> errors.  I believe this means that some fairly large percentage of the
>> packages with the manpage-has-errors-from-pod2man will FTBFS once this
>> becomes the default version of Perl.

>> http://lintian.debian.org/tags/manpage-has-errors-from-pod2man.html

> Looks like at least 50 packages that will start to FTBFS if I am reading
> that graph right.  Personally, I would appreciate that these packages
> were fixed before we started the transition to avoid making the
> transition longer than it has to be.

Note that this will only apply to packages that run pod2man during the
build.  It's not at all clear to me how many of those packages fall into
that category (I haven't looked).  Some may ship prebuild man pages; I do
that for all of my packages, for example, just to avoid the build-time
dependency on pod2man and because frequently I'm using a much newer
version that produces better output, although I probably should modify the
Debian packaging to regenerate them at build time on the same grounds that
I've started using dh-autoreconf everywhere.

I'm also not completely positive that all of the various Perl module build
systems will fail on POD errors, since they may use Pod::Man directly
rather than running pod2man.  Pod::Man, in an attempt to be a well-behaved
library, does not die by default on syntax errors, although this can be
turned on with an option.

I notice that in several places people have added overrides for this tag.
I'd be very curious (as pod2man upstream) what the rationale is for those
overrides.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>