There is a misconception underlying the bug report - perl-cross-debian *cannot* change these statements, these are *copies* of instructions from outdated versions of perl - changing the values in perl-cross-debian is pointless as the files in the patches directory relate to old versions of perl which would need a specialised environment to build. That environment is likely to need to be sufficiently old that the syntax is still supported - specifically jessie.
So this is a timewarp issue. The syntax to be used is the syntax of the original package, itself long since replaced, on a system from a time closer to the timing of the version of perl being cross-built, not the version of perl-cross-debian. (Even if perl-cross-debian is installed outside that environment and then the support files copied in.) There is no expectation that a useful cross-build could be performed on any system based on current or future unstable. At very best it would need to be jessie, but perl-cross-debian couldn't get into jessie without being in unstable. perl-cross-debian_0.0.5/patches/debian/rules is simply a convenience *copy* of the debian/rules file from the perl package to be cross-built - itself a version which predates the Jessie release. (The copy exists in case the diff fails to apply but the old rules would still work enough to get a cross build of miniperl, not a complete perl.) Therefore, the bug is a false positive and a misunderstanding of how perl-cross-debian has to work. However, the usefulness of perl-cross-debian is to be superseded by support within perl itself, so I don't see a need to put perl-cross-debian back into stretch at this time. https://lists.debian.org/debian-cross/2016/01/msg00000.html The whole problem with perl-cross-debian is that updating to later versions of perl is a large and complex task - far too large and too complex to keep up with actual perl uploads. In the meantime, the task has continued to receive attention from the perl maintainers and perl upstream. It is useful to have perl-cross-debian available as is - just having *a* version of perl that can be cross-built and is somewhere close to something that can build and run perl scripts in a bootstrap environment is going to be of some use. It's not as if perl-cross-debian in unstable needs to be installed on unstable - even the perl dependency is actually avoidable. It's almost a source-only package with no executable content aimed at the installed system. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
pgpPf48QIpLzE.pgp
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
