[debhelper-devel] Bug#739249: dh_perl support for packages embedding perl

[Niko Tyni]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 10:54:00PM +1100, Brendan O'Dea wrote:
> On 17 February 2014 13:20, Marco d'Itri <md at linux.it> wrote:

> > dh_perl adds a perlapi dependency only to packages which contain XS
> > modules, so it would be nice if it could either recognize packages which
> > have an embedded perl interpreter or have a flag to force this
> > behaviour.
> 
> It has been some time since I looked at this, but according to policy
> you should not need a dependency on perlapi* at all:

That's my understanding as well.

> I can see an argument however for also adding a perlapi* dependency
> for packages which embed Perl, given that a non-trivial implementation
> will be using just as much of the Perl internals as a typical XS
> module.  This would require both a policy change, and an update to
> dh_perl.
> 
> Niko: have there been cases where a dependency on both libperl5.x and
> perlapi-5.X.y would have been different that just having the first
> dependency?  I can imagine cases where ABI compatibility was broken by
> minor versions, but don't recall an instance myself.

No, I don't think that has actually happened.

I would expect that an ABI incompatibility that forces a change to the
perlapi name would also mean an SONAME change (+package rename) for
libperl, and vice versa. This is what happens with major upgrades anyway.
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org