On Fri, Feb 21, 2025 at 05:43:54PM +0100, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
Hi perl Maintainers,
On Fri, Feb 21, 2025 at 05:32:08PM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez wrote:
adduser 3.139 uses Encode.pm but doesn't depend on the package providing
it (libperl5.40 is optional). It's likely the package is still installed
on most standard installations but it won't be on minimal installs
If a dependency is to be added, please make it 'perl' rather than 'libperl5.40'.
I'm not the adduser maintainer, but asking anyway: would it be
possible for perl-base to include Encode.pm? Then adduser could use
it without pulling in a full perl on most systems...
It's certainly technically possible, but it's not something to be done
lightly. As the Policy says, "removing functionality from the Essential
set is very difficult and is almost never done. Any capability added
to an essential package therefore creates an obligation to support that capability as part of the Essential set in perpetuity."
I'm not very clear on the background here. I saw something on IRC
about the apt -> adduser dependency being relevant here. But that's
an alternative dependency (base-passwd (>= 3.6.1) | adduser) AFAICS,
and I don't know why minimal containers wouldn't be fine with just a
recent base-passwd and no adduser.
From my point of view, perl-base exists for the benefit of the Debian
installer and maintainer scripts (prerm and preinst in particular),
and no end user systems should end up without the full perl installed.
So 'pulling in a full perl on most systems' is actually desirable.
Also I'm not sure how useful Encode.pm would be on its own. A lot of
the functionality in the upstream Encode distribution is split out to
separate modules like Encode::Alias, Encode::MIME::Header etc. I would
prefer not to have to add them piecemeal as bug reports pile in, even
less so at this stage of the release cycle.
And I haven't looked at what dependencies Encode itself might require,
so I don't know if it would pull other modules from the full perl into perl-base.
All that said, if there's consensus that adding Encode.pm is necessary,
I'm not blocking it. But I think this requires some research and at
least a debian-devel discussion first.
( For full disclosure, I note that there is also a separate libencode-perl
package in the archive. But that one depends on the full perl too,
it's mainly just a way to make newer versions available sooner. I
fear making it useful in this context would probably not be quite as
trivial as might seem at first glance.)
Sorry for not making things easier,
--
Niko
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