Worthless updates

[Chris Weyl]

On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:25 PM, Iain Arnell <iarnell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 5:53 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>> If they require a minimum version which didn't actually change anything
>> instead of the actual minimum required version, they're broken and need to
>> be fixed.

Many CPAN authors are very aggressive with their dependencies.
Presumptively, required versions is upstream's call, right?
Constantly second-guessing upstream -- a generally highly tested, very
responsive upstream in this case -- is a quick way for me to lose what
little of my sanity I have left :)  This isn't some random package
collection we're talking about; this is the CPAN, with a common bug
tracking, metadata-driven, testphilic infrastructure and culture.  We
have nearly 1,500 perl packages from the CPAN in Fedora, last I
checked, and we wouldn't be able to do this without relying on the
CPAN's strengths.

> Maybe it doesn't change anything for you, but if I write an
> application that uses Locale::Maketext::Lexicon, I don't want to be
> bugged by users elsewhere running perl 5.11 moaning about deprecation
> warnings - so I simply require the version that removes the warnings.

One of the more difficult things about keeping some of the more
dependency-heavy packages up to date (perl-DBIx-Class, I'm looking at
you) is making sure that all of the prereqs are up to date.  In this
context even what appears to be a "trivial" update in some smaller
package can have a disproportionate impact if not in place...  Making
small, incremental updates is far preferable here.

Everyone, please, if I may submit: we're more than marginally
off-topic here, and it seems we've veered off into a discussion of how
the loosely-coupled Perl SIG updates packages.  I'm not trying to shut
down the discussion -- I'm rather enjoying it :) -- but it's probably
more germane to perl-devel at lists.fedoraproject.org.  We'd love to have
you there :)

                                     -Chris
-- 
Chris Weyl
Ex astris, scientia