Bug#611573: vim: missing dependency on libperl

James Vega jamessan at debian.org
Sun Jan 30 23:01:08 UTC 2011


On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:26 PM, Niko Tyni <ntyni at debian.org> wrote:
> When the vim Perl bindings were changed to dynamic loading, the packages
> stopped depending on libperl5.10. I can see that a hard dependency may
> not be wanted, but perhaps a recommendation or at least a suggestion
> would be in order?

Yeah, I've been intending to add some indication that the libraries for
the language bindings should be installed.  Recommends would probably be
good since it'll make sure the libraries are installed in the common
case but allow people who want control over it to remove them.

> The lack of any dependency on libperl is going to be a problem when Perl
> is upgraded to a newer upstream version, in particular with the upcoming
> Perl 5.12 transition.
>
> The full name of the library ends up in the vim.gtk binary, so the Perl
> support stops working when the library changes to libperl5.12.3 (and it
> probably would with a hypothetical 5.10.2 too, for that matter, even if
> it was ABI compatible.)

Hmm, would it make sense to try and change this so it only uses the name
libperl5.10 instead of libperl5.10.1?

> While binNMUing vim will fix this, the package dependencies will not
> indicate that in any way. This makes it rather easy for the release team
> to miss the binNMU requirement altogether and consequently makes it more
> difficult to keep track of the transition status.
>
> As dpkg-shlibdeps can not help here and I can't see an obviously clean
> and correct solution, perhaps it would be OK to cheat a bit and do
> something like
>
>  Recommends: libperl5.10
>  Depends: perl-base (>= 5.10.1-17), perl-base (<< 5.10.2~)

Well, the intention of switching to dynamic loading of the language
binding libraries was to allow people not to install them.  As such, I'd
prefer not to require that users have to install related packages even
if they choose not to install the language binding.

Maybe I could build a throwaway version of Vim with the language
bindings built-in so dpkg-shlibdeps can do its detection and then use
that information for the Recommends?  Would that be sufficient for
whatever mechanism determines that packages should be binNMUed for
library transitions pick up Vim?

I'd be interested in how other packages which do dynamic loading of
libraries handle this situation.

> I wonder if this applies to the other interpreters like Python too?

I'd assume it applies to all of the bindings whenever they need a
transition.  I'd be surprised if this is the first package to do dynamic
loading and need binNMUs when the library it loads changes.  Maybe we
can find precedent somewhere else?

-- 
James
GPG Key: 1024D/61326D40 2003-09-02 James Vega <jamessan at debian.org>





More information about the pkg-vim-maintainers mailing list