> I believe he is arguing that whatever we end up doing needs to make it > easy for an external package-manager to find out what files CPAN6.pm > is going to install, and where, and what the dependencies were (both > Perl and system libraries). So that the various distributions can > make native packages from perl packages automatically (or at least as > close to automatically as possible, it gets a little uglier when > external libraries are involved). I am completely in agreement here.
> So if there is program "foo" that is written in Perl that Fedora wants to > distribute, they want to be able to list the dependencies when they > make the package for "foo". If foo requires a few packages, then they > just want to say that and then when foo is installed, pull in those > packages and any that those depend on, Agreed. > including any non-perl ones > that are needed by the perl packages. Here is where it gets sticky. Let's take a perl module which requires the Berkely DB - in fact, requires a specific API version. In Gentoo, you'd specify that with a slot dependency, while on Fedora you'd specify the release. The two distros may well use different names for the package and/or the slot/release specifier. This problem strikes me as intractable - I think the only thing we can do is provide a dependency specifier, clearly tagged as being external to the CPAN 6 archive, with a sensible name that allows a human to intervene and find the correct package for their distro.
