Could Debian Perl team take over PDL?

[Niko Tyni]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 11:50:34PM +0200, Sebastiaan Couwenberg wrote:
 
> For the RPATH issue we may want consider this patch for ExtUtils::MakeMaker:
> 
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/attachment.cgi?id=552448

Hm. If I understand this correctly, we have
  https://sources.debian.net/src/perl/5.22.2-1/debian/patches/debian/ld_run_path.diff/
for mostly the same effect. It makes MakeMaker skip RPATH for "standard"
library dirs. I'm not sure why that doesn't help here; I'm not aware
of other Perl-related packages suffering of similar issues.

The 2.016-1~exp1 autoreject looks like the problem is with
/usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5 which is apparently not a 'standard'
library directory for some reason. Those are determined from
$Config{libpth}, currently

 libpth='/usr/local/lib /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5/include-fixed /usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu /usr/lib /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu /lib/../lib /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu /usr/lib/../lib /lib';

I'm guessing /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5 comes from 'gfortran
-print-libgcc-file-name' in debian/f77conf.pl.

I suspect $Config{libpth} should contain /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/5
too, but it's a horrible mess and the semantics are rather unclear...

I see you switched to using 'chrpath -d' for 2.016-1~exp2.
I guess that's a tolerable workaround.

> > - I was a bit surprised that doc_vendor_install.patch is now needed, but
> >   apparently it's because upstream v2.007_03 added a "missing"
> >   doc_vendor_install target to Makefile.PL. Conceptually, running
> >   scantree.pl and mkhtmldoc.pl  during the package build/install
> >   phase seems useless to me, as they will be re-run from the postinst
> >   when the package is actually installed. I'm not sure if it would
> >   make more sense to just patch that away from Makefile.PL? And
> >   if we don't, I guess the results shouldn't go in places like
> >   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.22/PDL/HtmlDocs but rather under
> >   /var ?
> 
> FHS-wise /var seems more appropriate. Several bits of upstream code rely
> on the HtmlDocs being in a subdirectory one of the paths in @INC.

I see that was the case for 2.007-5, but there appears to be no HtmlDocs
directory at all there.

> We'll need to patch these to also try the directory under /var or use
> that exclusively instead. The trigger already uses /var/lib/pdl/html,
> 
> I guess /var/lib/pdl/HtmlDocs is most appropriate if we decide to change
> to path.

Perhaps a symlink /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.22/PDL/HtmlDocs ->
/var/lib/pdl/html would be enough?  That would be similar to what we
already do for Index.pod and pdldoc.db.
-- 
Niko