perl package split - if you maintain a perl-* module, read this message.

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 15:12 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 April 2007 15:04:47 Robin Norwood wrote:
> > Well, would you be happier with the 'not adding the packages to the
> > buildroots' idea?  IOW, package owners will have to add the proper
> > BuildRequires to their packages (which is really the more correct
> > solution).
> 
> Well, not exactly, because either way the packages as is will not rebuild, if 
> you unlink perl-devel from perl. 

I think there is consensus amongst most perl-packagers that such a
circular dep between perl<->perl-devel is not useful. Unfortunately
FC7's perl has not seen updates in recent weeks, which would have
allowed to iron out issue earlier.

>  The only way I would be _really_ happy is 
> if all our perl packages picked up this dep change and were rebuilt so that 
> anybody rebuilding our shipped srpms can do so without issue.  If I can't get 
> that...  then yeah, I think we should force the addition of perl-devel into 
> specs by not making it available in the buildroot.  Of course I may be voted 
> down...

Note that all this only affects "BuildRequires:". I.e. packages would
only be hit by the "packaging changes" during rebuilds (In 90% of all
cases they fail very hard with obvious fixes implied).

So, simply pushing (bug-fixed) split perl packages and not rebuilding
nor changing buildroots would effectively mean to "grandfather" the "old
packaging".

Ralf