Hi, I would like to move File::Temp, the standard Perl module for safely creating temporary files and directories, into the perl-base package. This would pull 122KB into essential set, 78KB of which is File::Temp itself. As growing the essential set affects all Debian systems, I think this needs a discussion on this list.
I'm aware that we've just frozen, and I'd like to leave the timing of the change out of this discussion. I'd personally like to do it for jessie and I don't see much risk for regressions, but I intend to discuss that with the release team separately. The init-system-helpers package uses File::Temp, and init-system-helpers provides some of Debian's core infrastructure for supporting multiple init systems by synchronizing service state to systemd from other init system implementations (enabling users to more easily switch back and forth). It therefore would be good to allow maintainers to use it freely in init scripts without depending on perl, which is not part of the required set. We want to make it as easy as possible to support multiple init systems. Additionally, it makes sense to ensure File::Temp is generally available to maintainer scripts, since securely creating a temporary file is both difficult and a reasonable action for maintainer scripts to want to take. So this also argues for promoting it to the essential set so that maintainer scripts don't have to worry about whether or not it's available. Using /usr/bin/mktemp from Perl scripts is unnecessarily hard and error-prone for such a security sensitive task. There's some background in #757891. The current state is very much suboptimal, and while this isn't the only way to solve it, I'm convinced now that it's the right one. -- Niko Tyni nt...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20141108182608.GA28362@estella.local.invalid
