Dear stable release team, At the perl sprint in Hamburg, we discussed the possibility of cherry-picking all relevant bugfixes from perl 5.24.4 into stretch. We did something similar once before, I think in 5.14.2-21+deb7u1 (importing parts of 5.14.4) but I couldn't find the specific release bug now.
In general I think we would like to more regularly imnport new stable releases into Debian stable, as upstream have a very similar quality bar to Debian here: https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/perl/pod/perlpolicy.pod#MAINTENANCE-BRANCHES Rather than actually import the new upstream release, we would propose cherry-picking (hopefully using some automated machinery to minimise the possibility of errors being introduced) all relevant patches - the main omissions I would expect would be things relating to platorms that Debian doesn't support, and ones bumping the version number everywhere, which tend to be very verbose. In addition to making the release process easier (a mini-transition of a handful of packages is needed each time even a minor version bump of perl happens) this would also make patches easier to review because they would be smaller. Would you be willing to blanket pre-approve updates of this sort in perl? Thanks, Dominic.
