Bug#342751: dh-make-perl: recursively package missing dependencies

Damyan Ivanov dmn at debian.org
Fri Apr 16 12:36:52 UTC 2010


tags 342751 help - patch
retitle 342751 dh-make-perl: recursively create missing packages
thanks

Hi,

This bug is five years old, but I'd like to comment on it.

There are several things I don't like in the patch.

* the two new scripts lack a license. This is a showstopper as it 
  gives noone but the original author to do anything with them
* detection of missing packages is made by parsing dh-make-perl's 
  output. This is too fragile. Imagine localisation kicking in.
* we no longer call apt-file directly. Besides, pointing it to a local 
  cache directory 'hides' the system-wide Contents files, which may be 
  needed
  There is another bug (#478781) which suggests using dpkg -S for 
  finding modules available in locally installed packages. Fixing that 
  bug would help and make the local-apt approach unnecessary, as the 
  locally-built packages may be needed as build-dependencies.
  Another approach would be to keep lists of CPAN distribution 
  contents and "plug" that in the module search. No actual package 
  build or install would be required.

'patch' tag removed.

That said, I like the idea. My plan is to first implement 
a --trace-depends option which would only print the dependency tree. 
This is in TODO, in case someone is interested:

    * add new command, trace-depends. To be used like

      dh-make-perl trace-depends --cpan Foo-Bar

      it shall output a tree-like structure of missing dependencies 
      without preparing any packaging yet

      Ryan52 already has a program which does this, in svn as
      ./scripts/cpan-unpackaged-deps.pl. Steal code. or wait for 
      Ryan52 to eventually do it himself.

    * use the procedure for finding the missing dependencies and 
      create packagiing for all of them.

It is not very clear /when/ I'll get to this though, so marking the 
bug 'help'.





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