Subject: Re: depending on both perl and perl-thread harmful?
To: Eric Gillespie <epg@netbsd.org>
From: Pavel Cahyna <pavel.cahyna@st.cuni.cz>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 11/16/2004 12:56:11
Hello, thanks for your reply. Please Cc: me in replies.

Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about perl, so my conclusions may be
incorrect.

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 21:54:05 +0000, Eric Gillespie wrote:

>> 2/ why does the swig-perl package register dependency on perl or
>> perl-thread if it can work correctly only with that one it was built
>> against?
> 
> Because if you have no perl installed, it doesn't care which one
> gets installed so long as it is >= 5.8.  Maybe i need to do

What about binary packages? If you make a binary package of swig-perl, it
will request one of them, but only one choice is correct (depending of
the perl package it has been built against). So if you use pkg_add -r to
automatically resolve dependencies, you have 50% probability that you'll
end with a non-working swig-perl, even if the dependencies are satisfied
correctly.

Maybe this applies to some other perl-using packages - I have no knowledge
of perl so I don't know what packages are likely to be sensitive to this
choice and what aren't.

Bye	Pavel