RFC - p5-* dependencies and Perl core modules

[Ulrich Habel <rhaen%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

Hi,

as some of you may have noticed already, I've started to update some
of the Perl (aka p5-*) packages and try to bring the glory of Perl
back to pkgsrc. We all know that Perl modules need some love in
pkgsrc, however, the Perl itself is well maintained and is at the
latest version (in -current pkgsrc).

Perl ships with plenty of modules already which are called core
modules. However, those modules still exist on CPAN, are maintained
and are actively developed by the community. The version in core tends
to be an older one but is a more robust and more stable version.
That's why we have the modules as p5-* packages and as modules shipped
with the Perl core in pkgsrc. (E.G. the CGI.pm module was fairly old
in core - that's why we have www/p5-CGI).

The Perl guys did a great job and some of the core modules are really
up to date. Sometimes our p5-* packages are older than the module
versions shipped with Perl core.

As an example:

I've updated archivers/p5-Archive-Tar to the latest and greatest version: 1.82
The version shipped with Perl is: 1.76


We do have some packages which have p5-Archive-Tar as dependency for
example: mail/spamassasin (from the Makefile)

DEPENDS+=   p5-Archive-Tar>=1.23:../../archivers/p5-Archive-Tar


This makes no sense to me and I would like to remove those
dependencies as they are not needed. This would help us to remove
unneeded dependencies from pkgsrc and will help to build software
better, faster and more reliable. We should keep the p5 packages such
as Archive-Tar if someone wants to use a newer version for whatever
purposes, however, we should remove dependencies when they are not
needed.


Any opinions on this?

I would like to prepare a list of packages and their Makefile which
will be changed for your comments.



Hints:
The list of coremodules shipped with Perl can be generated by:

corelist -v v5.14.2 (our version we have in pkgsrc)


Regards

Uli

-- 
Ulrich Habel
The NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc)