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

[Vincent Lefevre]

On 2015-12-20 19:13:05 +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 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.

Unfortunately, aptitude doesn't know the intention when a
recommendation is dropped: in general, it means that the package
became useless, but this is not the case here, where some feature
is no longer there.

> 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.

This is not only for developers. This module can also be useful for
the end user to build other Perl modules that are not provided by
Debian (this was precisely my case).

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

If these release notes are not shown by APT, this is not really
useful.

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent at vinc17.net> - Web: <https://www.vinc17.net/>
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