Bug#808430: perl-modules-5.22: after the upgrade to perl 5.22, the Module::Build module is no longer present

[Niko Tyni]

On Sun, Dec 20, 2015 at 04:55:19PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:

> You're right that it would have been nice to have a NEWS item about
> this, for which I apologise. It seems upstream removed Module::Build
> and CGI without the normal deprecation cycle which would normally trigger
> us to add the Recommends or Suggests (usually for one release cycle).
> All packages which were known to use these modules have of course have
> bugs filed against them.

No, the 5.20 perl-modules packages (including the one in jessie) actually
did Recommend libmodule-build-perl, precisely to pull it in so that
people wouldn't lose it on upgrades. If aptitude automatically removes
it when the recommendation is gone, that's not working well together
with our intentions.

I don't really know how to help that; we don't want to be stuck
recommending libmodule-build et al. forever. I think this needs to
be handled as a documentation issue.

As you noted later, NEWS.Debian announcements about developer things
like this don't seem appropriate, as they are (supposed to) be shown to
all Debian users, and the vast majority won't care. I think CGI.pm has
a better claim to such an announcement, but not good enough to justify
it either IMO.

What we can do, and have done in the past, is to add an entry in
the release notes about module removals.

FWIW, #747628 has some related discussion.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org