Brian: On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 5:57 PM, brian m. carlson<sand...@crustytoothpaste.ath.cx> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 05:14:29PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote: >> This module is a generic Perl module that is designed to install libjio if it >> is not installed, and then report the flags required for programs to link to >> it. Under Debian, installing libjio via this package is not necessary (since >> it can simply Build-Depend and Depend on the libjio package itself. >> >> However, the Perl module still needs to be installed so that Perl programs >> can >> find it, and the flags required to link to it. This will be useful if modules >> other than simply IO::Journal (later to be ITP'd as libio-journal-perl, once >> it is appropriately uploaded to CPAN). >> >> Luckily, since only the Perl stuff is going to be installed, then it's not >> likely we'll ever need to really upgrade this module... > > Can't you just patch the modules in question so that they don't need to > use this module? It seems silly to create a module just to make sure > that a dependency is installed. That's for the Perl module building > system or dpkg to ensure. That is a very good point. However, I'm just not sure if other modules will want to use Alien::Libjio -- it has a few methods that wrap around pkg-config and ExtUtils::Liblist, so that you can get compile flags and linker flags (that applications need to compile XS bindings against libjio).
I did consider the idea of patching at first, but I wasn't sure that would be good in the event that a module other than IO::Journal needs that functionality. On the other hand, I suppose you are correct - for Debian systems, we can always expect libjio to be in the right place, and so this module might be unnecessary to package. I'll need to think about this more. I did file the ITP but it's sort of tentative, and I might retract it later pending further review/discussion. FYI it should be mentioned that there is at least one module which is a precedent for this type of behaviour, see libalien-wxwidgets-perl. We do have libwx-perl (the WxWidgets Perl Bindings), and we do have the WxWidgets toolkit itself, so one could also argue for the same thing with libalien-wxwidgets-perl. Ideally, we'd figure out a (Perl package-specific) policy on what to do about Alien:: modules. I've attached the Debian-Perl group list too, so we'll probably end up having a discussion there as well. > > If we had a separate Perl module to ensure every dependency that a Perl > module might need, we'd have lots of unnecessary modules. Thanks for the advice! Cheers, Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
