Bug#810823: perl: break .ph files into a separate (source?) package

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 05:40:25PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote:
> Package: perl
> Version: 5.22.1-4
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> The h2ph conversion of selected system header files we're doing as
> part of the perl build is giving me some grief in my cross building
> experiments, because h2ph can't be run with miniperl (it loads re.so)
> but needs Config.pm for the target system.
> 
> While this can be worked around, it prompted me to investigate the
> usefulness of the generated .ph files a bit. We know that h2ph is a
> gross hack (see #510984) that doesn't always work (#190887), and the
> generated files produce lots of warnings (#688974).
> 
> codesearch.debian.net reports 48 source packages matching
>  \b(require|do)\b.*\.ph\b
> 
> I went through those and weeded out 19 false positives, leaving just 29
> packages actually using those .ph files. While there may of course be
> local scripts using them, I don't think these numbers warrant shipping
> .ph files with perl, effectively on all Debian systems.

[splitting into separate packages]

I'm not really clear on what splitting these into separate packages
(which sounds like a considerable amount of work) really gains us?
The size gain in the perl package (around 50kB as far as I can see) on
its own doesn't quite justify it for me.

Even if we do want to produce a separate binary package, I'm even
less that a separate source package is justified, but maybe I missed
something.

Cheers,
Dominic.