Update on versioned provides and perl: we discussed this at the 2017 Perl team sprint in Lloret de Mar, and it looks like all the blockers for this have been resolved. I intend to switch to versioned provides for the upcoming 5.26 packages, targeted for buster.
This starts a soft transition where all packages with alternative dependencies like perl (>= x) | libfoo-bar-perl (>= y) libfoo-bar-perl (>= y) | perl (>= x) can be changed to use just the libfoo-bar-perl (>= y) part. The alternative dependency on perl was always just an optimization to avoid needlessly installing the separate package when it was already recent enough in the core. With versioned provides this optimization is no longer necessary. The plan is to push this into experimental soon, then test rebuild packages as usual to verify that nothing is clearly broken. After that, I intend to raise this one more on debian-devel@ and possibly with the release team, in case somebody's aware of any more blockers in the archive infrastructure etc. -- Niko Tyni nt...@debian.org