Ben Hines has again raised the issue of how we handle perl modules which are provided by newer versions of perl, but were not provided by older versions of perl. This has been brought up before by JF Mertens.
Each release of perl incorporates some new perl modules into the release, and in addition updates the versions of some of the existing modules. On the other hand, many of those modules continue to be under active development, and someone may need a more recent version of the module than was provided by the most recent release of perl. The obvious solution to this problem would be to use versioned Provides statements. That is, if you installed perl581 (or the virtual system-perl581), you would get Provides: digest-md5-pm (= 2.27-1) while if you installed perl580 you would get Provides: digest-md5-pm (= 2.20-1) and earlier versions would not provide this package at all. However, as far as I know, dpkg and apt-get do not recognize versioned Provides. So we can't use this system at the moment. Hopefully, somebody will get interested in the task of revising our tools to allow versioned Provides. (I'll comment more about why it would be bad to use non-versioned Provides at the end of this message.) What we could do for now, though, is to make some better documentation about what versions of which perl module packages are provided by the different flavors of perl. A place to start, if anybody wants to work on this, is: http://search.cpan.org/~jhi/perl-5.8.0/ and the related pages which are linked from there. -- Dave P.S. Here's why it would be bad to use non-versioned Provides. Of course, we can add "Provides: digest-md5-pm" to the perl580 and perl581 packages. Suppose package foo then needs a new feature which is contained in v.2.30 of digest-md5-pm. Then package foo will have to say "Depends: digest-md5-pm (>= 2.30-1)" which also is no problem. However, if perl583 is later released and it contains version 2.30 of digest-md5-pm, there will be no way to remove the versioned depedency from package foo. That is, you'll have to live with "Depends: perl583-core | digest-md5-pm (>= 2.30-1)" forever (even if we later get a versioned Provides implemented). Thus, using non-versioned Provides would give only a short-term solution to this problem, and it would prevent us from ever implementing the long-term solution of versioned Provides. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program. Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive? Does it help you create better code? SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help YOU! Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/ _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
