Subject: warn if packages do not adhere to Debian's Perl naming policy

From: Ansgar Burchardt <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 01:21:11 +0900

Package: lintian
Version: 2.3.4
Severity: wishlist

Jonas Smedegaard <[email-masked]> writes:

> On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 05:40:53PM +0900, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
>>
>>Steve Langasek <[email-masked]> writes:
>>
>>>> Ubuntu includes several Perl module packages that do not adhere
>>>> Debian's naming policy[1].  Once Debian includes these modules in
>>>> a differently named package, there are problems if one tries to
>>>> install both packages at the same time.  See [2] or [3] for
>>>> examples.
>>>
>>> Do you have a proposal for how to identify these packages?  Ubuntu
>>> packages are also expected to comply with this part of Debian
>>> policy, so this doesn't change anything unless we can automatically
>>> identify the ones that don't.
>>
>> I did search for package containing files in
>> /usr/(lib|share)/perl5. Most problematic packages were already
>> renamed, I only filed a bug report for gtk2-ex-formfactory-perl [1]
>> (already fixed). I also identified a package that was renamed in
>> Debian, but where the old package has not been removed from Ubuntu
>> yet [2].
>
> Perhaps file a bug against lintian to watch this kind of pattern?

That is a good idea.

Could lintian warn if packages include files in /usr/(lib|share)/perl5
and the package name does not adhere to the Debian Perl Policy [1]?
To further avoid false positives it should be enough to warn only for
packages named "*-perl" (but not "lib*-perl") or "perl-*".

See the initial mail [2] on [email-masked] and the discussion for a
suggested mass-bug filing [3] on [email-masked] for details why this
might be a problem.

Regards,
Ansgar

[1] <http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/perl-policy/ch-module_packages.html#s-package_names>
[2] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2010/02/msg00055.html>
[3] <http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2010/03/msg00701.html>

---

From: Don Armstrong <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 10:51:54 -0700

> packages named "*-perl" (but not "lib*-perl") or "perl-*".

This isn't exactly right; a package which has perl language bindings
will ship things in /usr/*/perl5 but it doesn't need to conform to the
perl naming policy.

In general, if something is distributed in /usr/bin (certainly if it's
not actually written in perl), it doesn't need to conform to the perl
naming policy. There are probably other exceptions as well, and it
would probably be ok to ignore packages which (while named
differently) Provides: the appropriate lib*-perl name.

Don Armstrong

-- 
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
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