Bug#762638: Update on DFSG-freeness of perl/Configure

[Dominic Hargreaves]

Hi Helmut et al,

At the Perl 5 hackathon in Amsterdam[1], Niko and I have been working
on Configure maintenance with several other core developers (including
H.Merijn Brand, who has been the lead/only maintainer of Configure for
some years). The conclusions of these discussions are threefold:

1) the previous assertion on this ticket that Configure was, de facto,
*a* preferred form of modification was a misunderstanding on our side.
I have updated the header for Configure, and the information in
Porting/pumpkin.pod, upstream. Hence this bug being reopened.

2) an understanding of the the current mechanism for updating Configure
upstream has been shared amongst several people, and the documentation
has been improved both in the perl source and in the separate metaconfig
repository, which is now on github[2]. It is now much easier for a new
contributor to start working on this process upstream (and PRs are
welcome there).

2a) There is renewed interest in looking at the dist tools itself,
with a view to modernizing them. I'm not sure if the type of cross-building
work you might be interested in would be better done there or not. 

2b) One issue is that we are still using many older version of units
from the upstream dist package, as well as the perl-specific units, but
over time this divergence is being reduced.

3) the Debian perl package is in the process of being updated to
regenerate Configure in the build process by adding (parts of) the
repository to the perl source package as a separate component. Although
the upstream metaconfig.git contains a generated version of the tools
from dist, we are using the already-packaged version of dist in Debian
for this and this doesn't (substantially) change Configure at the moment.

I'm therefore hopeful that this bug will be resolved in more satisfactory
way very soon, and that this might prove a useful basis for your porting
work.

Best wishes,
Dominic.

[1] thanks to the sponsors for this event, listed at http://p5h.org/
[2] <https://github.com/perl5-metaconfig/metaconfig>