At 16:30 -0400 20/05/01, Johnny C. Lam wrote:
>I'm working on an update of the perl package to 5.6.1.  I'd like to
>get some feedback on one of the goals we are trying to achieve in
>pkgsrc with respect to perl:
>
>(*) Do we want _all_ of pkgsrc to always build correctly regardless of
>     the version of perl5 installed?
>
>Okay, _all_ the perl packages is hard, but doable, but it'd be better
>if some small subset of the perl packages required the latest version
>of perl.  The ones I have in mind are p5-Data-Dumper, p5-Devel-Peek,
>p5-Devel-DProf, and p5-CGI.  For these packages, I'd like to turn them
>into empty packages that just depend on perl-5.6.1 as they're
>distributed as part of the main Perl library now.  All of the other
>perl packages will still be buildable with perl-5.00404 installed.
>Would this be okay?  It seems like a maintenance headache to keep
>ripping out those modules from the base perl library into separate
>modules just because perl-5.00404 didn't have them in its base
>library.  As other perl modules get absorbed into future releases, I'd
>like to turn them into placeholders as well.
>
>Comments?

If the modules becoming part of the base distribution of perl don't
get updated (too often) by themselves, this is fine with me.

But remember that CGI.pm was distributed with perl even back in the 5.004_04
days, but that it has been updated many times in between the perl releases.
In this particular case, I feel that a "real" p5-CGI package is the only way
to go.

- Erik
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