Argh, missed the cloning. Here's a copy of what I sent to #757891. ----- Forwarded message from Niko Tyni <[email protected]> -----
Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 22:15:12 +0300 From: Niko Tyni <[email protected]> To: Michael Stapelberg <[email protected]> Cc: Samuel Thibault <[email protected]>, [email protected], Martin Pitt <[email protected]>, [email protected] 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 <[email protected]> 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 [email protected] ----- End forwarded message ----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
