Hi Release team, I plan to send this later on today. Do you have any comments on it before I do (in particular with reference to the perl 5.14 plan).
Thanks, Dominic. ----- Forwarded message from Dominic Hargreaves <d...@earth.li> ----- From: Dominic Hargreaves <d...@earth.li> To: debian-devel-annou...@lists.debian.org Subject: Bits from the perl maintainers In this update: - Completion of perl 5.12 transition - perl 5.12 breakage - Upgrade trigger - Plans for 5.14 Completion of 5.12 transition ----------------------------- As you'll probably have noticed by now, around 12 months after the first upstream 5.12 release, perl 5.12.3 was uploaded to unstable and has now, thanks to the superb work of the release team, has migrated to testing. This marks the first major new version of perl in Debian for three years. perl 5.12 breakage ------------------ Whilst we did our best to minimise perl 5.12 specific breakage in the run-up to the upload by regularly rebuilding perl-related packages, there will inevitably be the occasional problem to be fixed. The upstream manpage[0] documents potentially incompatible changes. In addition to changes documented upstream, the perl 5.12 packages also included a change to the compilation flags, enabling use of 64 bit integers on 32 bit platforms. This triggered a few extra bugs during rebuild testing. If you find or fix a bug in a package which is triggered by the use of perl 5.12, please let us know (at <p...@packages.debian.org>) once it's fixed so that we can add a Breaks entry in the perl package. This will help reduce problems appearing during partial upgrades to wheezy. Note that this does not apply to cosmetic bugs where only deprecation warnings appear. You can also add the usertag perl-5.12-transition owned by the debian-p...@lists.debian.org user. Upgrade trigger --------------- If you are responsible for a daemon type package which uses perl and would be broken by a major version change, you can now make use of the perl-major-upgrade trigger which was introduced in the 5.12 packages. The common use-case here would be to restart daemons when a major upgrade of this sort occurs. For more information about this, please see the debian-policy bug report[1] on the subject. The first package to use this was spamassassin. Plans for 5.14 -------------- The upstream perl community's plans now include a new major release of perl 5 once a year, and Saturday's transition of perl 5.12 to testing coincided with upstream's 5.14.0 release. An initial 5.14 package will make its way to experimental soon, and we're hoping to start some archive rebuild testing soon after that, with a view to (subject to approval from the release team) an upload to unstable later this year. This should put us in a good position for the wheezy release (although it will remain to be seen which version wheezy ends up with). It's not too soon to be checking your packages (and encouraging your upstreams to do the same) for compatibility with perl 5.14, although we'll be filing bugs where we discover issues during the course of our testing. The release notes[2] at may be of use here. [0] <http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5120delta.html#Potentially-Incompatible-Changes> [1] <http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=619275> [2] <http://search.cpan.org/~jesse/perl-5.14.0/pod/perldelta.pod> -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email) ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/ PGP key 5178E2A5 from the.earth.li (keyserver,web,email) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-release-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110517085204.gw4...@urchin.earth.li
