Packaging Perl

[Jon Turney]

On 03/06/2020 11:23, Achim Gratz wrote:
> 
> I'm in the process of getting the next maintenance update for Perl-5.30
> ready.  I'm trying to prepare for the inevitable major update (that will
> not be binary compatible, so requires a complete repackaging of all
> dependencies again) some time later.  I was planning to use the newly
> available PROVIDES in cygport to have the perl_base package provide
> "perl530" as a synthetic package name.  Then I'll arrange to generate
> all Perl distributions with a REQUIRES for "perl530".  Eventually we'll
> need to come up with a way of generating that info automatically, but I
> don't think there's any place yet in the installation where the PROVIDES
> information gets installed, so cygport can not pick up on it currently.

I think the perl cygclass in cygport can know the perl version being 
built against, and can add that to the requires?

I'm not sure doing it automatically for everything is possible.

> What I'm unsure about is what happens when we actually upgrade Perl,
> which means the new Perl will providse something like "perl532" and we
> have a bunch of distributions that require the new "perl532" plus a
> bunch of not-yet-updated packages that require "perl530" instead.  The
> idea is that either the packages needing the old Perl need to get
> de-installed or the upgrade has to be held off until every package has
> got an upgrade to the newer Perl.  On GNU/Linux zypper would offer at
> least two solutions to chose from in this case, but setup just picks one
> of the solutions that libzypp offers and that may not be the one the
> user favored.

Yes, setup needs a UI to present that choice.