Hall Stevenson wrote: > perl > perl-5.005 > perl-5.005-base > perl-5.6 > perl-5.6-base > perl-base
> Why, for example, are there two versions of perl ?? Isn't perl-5.6 > backwards-compatible with perl-5.0x ?? I do see that the perl-5.6 > package can be removed and will leave me with 'perl'. It's mostly backwards-compatable between minor releases. Not always, and there are lots of incompatabilities for perl binary modules. We were using a scheme that let us include any number of versions of perl as you list above, but it turned out to be more trouble that it was worth. Then the perl maintainer came up with an elegant way to deal with the binary perl modules problem, and the result is that unstable is a transition release between the versioned perl packages and a plain "perl" package. The versioned packages can be removed, assuming you don't have any packages left that depend on them. -- see shy jo
