why is Padre dependent on Win32::API on Fedora ? [was Re: Broken dependencies: perl-Padre]

[Gabor Szabo]

It took me some time but I think I still have not managed to
fully digest this discussion.

I am in the hope that both the Fedora Perl packagers and
CPAN authors would prefer to eliminate as much of the
manual work required by the packagers as possible.

One of the biggest complaints about Perl I got from Jeff Johnson
during FOSDEM was that Perl is too dynamic and thus the
dependency extraction often fails....
and the day after I saw this error report for Padre.

IMHO if any packager is trying to parse a CPAN module
for dependencies they are duplicating efforts.
The authoritative list of packages should be in META.yml

I understand that the Fedora group prefers to install all
optional dependencies of a package and this is currently not
served by the META.yml but then IMHO instead of parsing
the files yourselves we should enhance META.yml to
include this list.

That way the CPAN authors and the various tools in the CPAN
ecosystem could already check this and you would get a higher
quality upstream package.

If you agree with the above, could we try to work out a list of
requirements for the improved META.yml?

Of course you don't need to abandon parsing the source files.
That can serve as an additional quality check but I'd like to
see this information also recored in the META.yml file.

Actually if you are already parsing the files and creating
your own list of dependencies, I would really like to see
this information flowing back to the CPAN authors. Would it
be possible to export the list of CPAN packages you are
maintaining along with their dependencies so I could create
a report of this?


regards
   Gabor