On Wed, 2007-05-09 at 21:10 +0100, Jose Pedro Oliveira wrote: > Hi, > > As I have been rather busy in the past months I haven't had the time > to follow the mailing lists and only this weekend did I realize that > the disruptive [1] change of splitting perl had been pushed through. > > Questions: Disclaimer: All answer are my personal view and opinion. > 1) What exactly do we gain with such splitting? - Smaller install size - Smaller buildsys size - Introduces real perl-module build-deps instead of a dependency on a "lumped-together" meta-rpm (=> improved long term stability of perl module packages) - The option to upgrade/replace "core perl modules". > 2) How did such a disruptive change got through Red-Eng as I haven't > seen it announced as a milestone for F7 ? > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/CategoryFedora7Features rel-eng would have to answer. > 3) Again how does this only gets committed this last weekend > (after the 4th test release)? The split had been pending and discussed here for many weeks, but progress on the perl package had been a snail. Some details had been controversial, some details were broken, but 90% of the delays had been caused by collaboration not working. IMO, the currently split is only "half of the story" and far from being complete. > 4) How does a company plans to release a product with several > hundred packages broken (SRPMs that users won't be able to rebuild)? Which harm does this to the Fedora run-time? It's a "grandfathering" approach and it's actually not different from not performing an ordered mass rebuilt. > Thanks in advance for your time, > jpo > (a very concerned user/packager that sees lot of his scripts broken > because of missing perl core modules and doesn't want to review all his > specfiles in order to add perl core modules to the build requirements list) It's much less effort than you expect. 1. In almost all cases you will see hard rebuild-breakdowns with obvious "easy-fixes". In 90% of all cases all that would be required is to add "BuildRequires: perl(ExtUtils::MakeMaker)" and (less frequent) "BuildRequires: perl(Test::More)". 2. Such issues could easily be approached by a perl-SWAT team, but ... 3. It's a grandfathering approach. There is no need to rebuild everything. Ralf
