[Fedora-packaging] Question about missing CGI.pm

[Paul Howarth]

On Sun, 6 Mar 2011 08:05:43 -0800
Mike Ramirez <gufymike at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> I wnet to #fedora first, they sent me to upstream, I checked with
> #perl, no reply. Then I realized this is the probably the best place
> to ask.
> 
> I had an issue earlier where CGI.pm wasn't installed (or in the @INC
> path). Searching a bit more shows me that perl-core meta-package (not
> installed) lists it as a dependency (requires perl-CGI), perl package
> says it provides it though [1].  This is fedora 13 installed from the
> KDE spin.  
> 
> Also, I don't install many perl packages for my own use, so the
> packages that depend on it are not installed. Which this and the KDE
> spin base, makes me suspect this makes it a race condition. 
> 
> I also saw the bug report (Bug 486579 ) but was listed as wont fix
> (this suggests splitting perl-CGI into two seperate packages), it
> appears to have been rejected as a wontfix 
> 
> Technically, the question is, why isn't CGI.pm installed/available
> with just perl, is this a bug, race condition or expected behavior?
> 
> The reason this comes up is that Go lang just introduced new tests
> that require CGI.pm, which is what I require it for. The go team is
> going to change the tests to skip it if CGI.pm isn't available I
> think. 
> 
> I did fix this with `yum install perl-CGI`.
> 
> Also the go maintainer might want to add this to the spec file for
> go-lang with the rpm that distributes the tests.

Yes, if a package needs it for its test suite, the spec for that
package should have:

BuildRequires: perl(CGI)

That will work regardless of whether CGI.pm is in the main perl package
or in a separate perl-CGI package.

Paul.