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Postings from April 2002
On Wed, May 01, 2002 at 12:34:44AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote: > I am deeply disappointed by the recent move to drop some of the files > (CGI.pm, et al.) in perl distribution /usr/src/contrib/perl5. By saving > a few hundred kilobytes, you are risking losing a few hundred perl > hackers that run FreeBSD thereon. Just as a point of order, here's how Debian handles the problem. From a single source dpkg, conveniently named 'perl', Debian splits the binary distrubtion into several packages. perl-base stripped down version with only essential libraries perl-doc man pages and POD perl-modules architecture independent core modules perl-suid a setuid perl binary perl-debug a debug enabled perl libperl5.6 perl shared library libperl-dev perl header files and then they have libcgi-pm-perl CGI.pm module libstorable-perl Storable libterm-readline-perl-perl .... Debian needs a stripped down perl-base because it uses it to install Debian. You don't want to try and wedge 40 megs of Perl onto an install disk. perl-doc is nice for systems where 7 megs of storage space can mean a lot. In fact, Debian policy splits nearly all documentation into packages seperate from their binaries. and so on. There is also a perl pseudo-binary-package which simply depends on perl-base & perl-modules, to pull together the complete perl build. perl-doc, libterm-readline-perl-perl, etc... are all suggested [1]. In this way perl can be distributed in chunks without the source being broken up. There is still a single perl dpkg. FreeBSD may wish to follow this model. They may already be and we're just panicking. Dunno. That's why I didn't forward this onto the FreeBSD lists. [1] "Suggested" is a real attribute of a dpkg. For example, apache suggests apache-doc, but depends on apache-common. You must install apache-common for apache to work, but you don't need apache-doc. It's just nice. -- Michael G. Schwern <schwern@pobox.com> http://www.pobox.com/~schwern/ Perl Quality Assurance <perl-qa@perl.org> Kwalitee Is Job One I know you get this a lot, but what's an unholy fairy like you doing in a mosque like this?