Argh, missed the cloning. Here's a copy of what I sent to #757891.
----- Forwarded message from Niko Tyni <nt...@debian.org> -----
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 22:15:12 +0300
From: Niko Tyni <nt...@debian.org>
To: Michael Stapelberg <stapelb...@debian.org>
Cc: Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org>, 757...@bugs.debian.org, Martin Pitt
<mp...@debian.org>,
rsys...@packages.debian.org
Subject: Re: Bug#757891: init-system-helpers: Please do not depend on perl
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.23 (2014-03-12)
[cc'ing the rsyslog maintainers too]
On Tue, Aug 12, 2014 at 09:02:59AM +0200, Michael Stapelberg wrote:
> Samuel Thibault <sthiba...@debian.org> writes:
> > perl is separate from perl-base so that in tight environement, Debian
> > can be installed with only perl-base. A base system installed by d-i,
> > notably, is supposed to only install perl-base, not perl. It happens
> > however that d-i installs rsyslog, which depends on init-system-helpers,
> > which depends on perl. Is the whole perl really needed? If some
> > modules are needed, they could be moved to perl-base, to save having to
> > install the whole perl on all Debian base systems.
> init-system-helpers uses File::Path, File::Basename, File::Find and
> Text::ParseWords — none of them is in perl-base.
(FWIW Text::ParseWords is.)
> Please report back once you’ve made perl-base contain all of them.
I wasn't around when the perl/perl-base split was designed, but my
understanding is that perl-base exists to offer a usable perl interpreter
for maintainer scripts even during upgrades, and for d-i to work.
It's not blindingly obvious to me that the perl package must not be part
of a "base system installed by d-i", but I can see it would be nice,
particularly as this has apparently been the case until now. OTOH, we
(the perl maintainers) would actually prefer that an end user never
encounters a system without the full perl package, as the split is
somewhat controversial upstream.
See also https://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2010/11/msg00021.html
The perl-base package is Essential:yes, so inclusion there is pretty
close to a promise of supporting that interface forever inside the
Essential set. So care must be taken when adding functionality there.
IMO Perl reimplementations of /usr/bin/find, /usr/bin/basename,
/bin/mkdir -p, and /bin/rm -r don't seem very good candidates.
What's the dependency from rsyslog to init-system-helpers for?
Is there any room for movement there?
--
Niko Tyni nt...@debian.org
----- End forwarded message -----
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