Bug#912695: apt-show-versions: breaks "apt-get update" and uninstallable after Perl 5.28 upgrade

[Niko Tyni]

On Sun, Nov 04, 2018 at 06:09:36PM +0100, Salvatore Bonaccorso wrote:
 
> This is likely due to the perl upstream change around/with
> https://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git/commitdiff/c0e3b4b51cabf15ed8fc5f564dfeea31c25f5239
> .
> 
> It can be workarounded by either setting higher limits for
> recursion_limit/recursion_limit_hash or disable it with -1
> 
> $Storable::recursion_limit=-1;
> $Storable::recursion_limit_hash=-1;
> 
> but I'm not sure this will be the right solution.

Thanks. I've filed #912900 about this on the Perl side. Christoph:
please use these workarounds at least for now. Apologies for the trouble.

Also, please let us know at perl at packages.debian.org when a workaround
is in Debian. We can then add dependency metadata on the perl side to
make sure apt-show-versions gets always upgraded before perl.

Longer term, I'm not sure Storable is the best tool for this (a cache
of apt list contents.) AFAICS you're reading the whole data structure
in memory even when you need just one entry? You might want to look at
the various Cache / CHI modules, or even just plain GDBM_File.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org