On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 05:40:25PM +0200, Niko Tyni wrote: > Package: perl > Version: 5.22.1-4 > Severity: wishlist > > The h2ph conversion of selected system header files we're doing as > part of the perl build is giving me some grief in my cross building > experiments, because h2ph can't be run with miniperl (it loads re.so) > but needs Config.pm for the target system. > > While this can be worked around, it prompted me to investigate the > usefulness of the generated .ph files a bit. We know that h2ph is a > gross hack (see #510984) that doesn't always work (#190887), and the > generated files produce lots of warnings (#688974). > > codesearch.debian.net reports 48 source packages matching > \b(require|do)\b.*\.ph\b > > I went through those and weeded out 19 false positives, leaving just 29 > packages actually using those .ph files. While there may of course be > local scripts using them, I don't think these numbers warrant shipping > .ph files with perl, effectively on all Debian systems.
[splitting into separate packages] I'm not really clear on what splitting these into separate packages (which sounds like a considerable amount of work) really gains us? The size gain in the perl package (around 50kB as far as I can see) on its own doesn't quite justify it for me. Even if we do want to produce a separate binary package, I'm even less that a separate source package is justified, but maybe I missed something. Cheers, Dominic.
