reassign 53794 perl-base severity 53794 important retitle 53794 perl policy is flawed -- 5.004 and 5.005 simultaneous thanks
>But wait, you're using 5.004, while this package is compiled for >5.005. That's why the perl version you're using can't find it. >IIRC, Perl 5.005 is now the "standard" for Debian (but I could be >way off here). That's why we had this mess last summer when we >were converting all the Perl modules to this version. No, not true: ii perl-5.004 5.004.05-3 Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and Report ii perl-5.004-base 5.004.05-3 The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister ii perl-5.005 5.005.03-4.1 Larry Wall's Practical Extracting and Report ii perl-5.005-base 5.005.03-4.1 The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister I have both installed. >> It kinda seems that this bug should be refiled against >> libxml-parser-perl. > >I don't think this is gonna work. How about "simply" upgrading to >5.004? Or is this not possible due to your boot floppies work? Red herring. But that gave me a thought: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]:d> ls -l /usr/bin/perl lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Jul 8 18:55 /usr/bin/perl -> /etc/alternatives/perl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]:d> ls -l /etc/alternatives/perl lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 19 Sep 22 10:35 /etc/alternatives/perl -> /usr/bin/perl-5.004 I mean, I know I could fix my alternatives, but is that the proper solution? I don't think so... If the script does have very special needs such as a specific version of Perl then you'll need to use #!/usr/bin/perl-5.004 (I take 5.004 as an example but you should replace 5.004 by whatever old version of Perl you are needing) and you'll need to add a dependency to perl-5.004. If it does furthermore request some binary modules then you'll need to package thoses modules especially for perl-5.004 instead of the latest Perl (being perl-5.005 or whatever else). Those modules packaged for old Perls will have to add the Perl version in their package name. For a module Foo::Bar, instead of calling the package libfoo-bar-perl you'll have to call it libfoo-bar-perl-5.004. Yet why should a script which uses a module which requires a specific version of perl itself have to depend on that specific version of perl -- that's not a very maintainable dependancy chain, as the above paragraph points out. The fact is that our perl policy is messed up -- The libxml-parser-perl module requires perl-5.005, but there is no guarantee that /usr/bin/perl is actually perl-5.005 -- that is managed by /etc/alternatives, thus, it is up to the user. I've refiled this to perl-base. .....Adam Di [EMAIL PROTECTED]<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
