On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 03:54:40PM -0700, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> netbsd-users removed from CC.
> 
> Since perl was mentioned ...
> 
> perl does have a problem. Its open-ended dependencies assumes that perl
> packages are interchangable with perl 5.8 and perl 5.6. This has caused
> problems for me on a few occassions on systems where I use packages but no
> pkgsrc.
> 
> I never send-pr'd it but I have mentioned it a couple times before. Can we
> get rid of the open-ended dependencies?
> 
> The DEPENDS should probably be more precise like like perl-5.6.* or
> perl-5.8.*.

There's a worse problem, or was as of a couple of weeks ago.  I believe
Johnny is working on it:

perl-5.8.3 and perl-5.8.4 produce a libperl.so that is *not* compatible
(unsurprisingly enough).  So, if you build anything that uses the shared
perl library, like ap-perl, against 5.8.4, and then try to install it
on a system with 5.8.3, it will happily install and *then* splode.

This caused a lot of head-scratching and chaos when we were upgrading
nbwww..!

-- 
 Thor Lancelot Simon	                                      tls@rek.tjls.com
   But as he knew no bad language, he had called him all the names of common
 objects that he could think of, and had screamed: "You lamp!  You towel!  You
 plate!" and so on.              --Sigmund Freud