The issue is basically, as you'll see in my comments on the updated bug, Perl virtuals are not very trivial, and every perl release results in a nightmare of fixes we have to apply to every Perl virtual in tree, so we don't , at present, want more virtuals than necessary.
I'd personally love to have a virtual for each thing that is in perl itself, as a virtual, because that would absolve me from a few headaches with depending on certain core modules, but I won't request it because the added complexity is just not really worth it. And its not made easier by the fact upstream declare dependencies on Modules, not Distributions , and Module<=>Distribution is resolved dynamically at install time, and we basically have to make assumptions downstream that modules wont jump around too much between releases . If we were to have a virtual for each *module* that was possible to depend on, there would be ... 668 virtuals, *just* for perl. I volunteer to be somewhere else if that ever happens. Not maintaining that, no thanks =) -- Kent
