Hi Chris. You've raised an important issue which I've been meaning to address.
There are a couple of different philosophies about the choice of perl Types, and I think we need to discuss this and settle on a common policy. Let me break this into two questions: what Types should be used, and should there be a difference between stable and unstable. Historically, we've seen periods when substantial numbers of users had replaced their Apple-installed perl with a more recent version. Even Apple's website appeared to advocate doing this at one time. So we've tried to accomodate the needs of our users. (On the other hand, this causes lots of headaches, in particular, since we cannot always test things.) So one point of view says that we should include as many perl module variants as possible, to accomodate users who have replaced their system perl with a newer version. This is the point of view that leads to the inclusion of Type 5.8.5, even though we've never had a perl 5.8.5 package in fink and this variant cannot be tested with an ordinary installation of fink. Another point of view says that we should limit the Types to those that we actually support. I personally like the second point of view, but I'd be glad to hear discussion about this from adherents of the first point of view. By the way, at the moment, bootstrapping fink is only permitted with a short list of installed versions of perl. I have been tempted to also only permit updating fink with that same short list, but I'm wary of breaking things for some users, so I haven't done it. Turning to the second question, I firmly believe in maintaining a difference between the stable and unstable trees in regards to Types. Everything in the stable tree must build on a standard fink system, and will be built when a binary distribution is created. Thus, 5.8.5 can never go into stable. However, it's pretty easy to maintain a system in which the list of Types for a package is different in stable and unstable. For example, the list of -man packages that includes all variants in Conflicts and Replaces lines is perfectly appropriate, even if some of those variants don't exist in the stable tree. The only thing that has to be modified is the Type line. Future plans affecting this question: perl 5.8.6 will go into stable fairly soon, and I'm working on creating -pm586 variants of the stable -pm581 packages. Also, it is unlikely that we'll include any version of perl prior to 5.8.1 in our 10.4 distribution for fink. -- Dave ------------------------------------------------------- SF email is sponsored by - The IT Product Guide Read honest & candid reviews on hundreds of IT Products from real users. Discover which products truly live up to the hype. Start reading now. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=6595&alloc_id=14396&op=click _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list Fink-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
