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Current Status

Perl 5.10.0 was accepted in unstable on 2008-05-01 and has been built sucessfully on all architectures except m68k.

TODO

Uninstallable packages

A lot of packages need to be rebuilt when Perl 5.10 hits unstable. These are the ~300 packages that Depend (or Pre-Depend) on perlapi-5.8.* or libperl5.8. All of these will be uninstallable, and many of them need some of the others to build.

A "stepladder approach" for this is ready: see

http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2008/01/msg00218.html http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-perl/scripts/perl-5.10-transition/

The rebuilds should be best done as BinNMUs, but the packages that fail to build with 5.10 (see the 'Usertag' section below) need to be fixed with sourceful uploads first.

libxml-parser-perl circular dependency

See #458144. This should definitely be fixed in one way or other before the unstable upload.

debconf-english vs. debconf-i18n

joeyh: "This may need manual buildd tweaks" http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2008/01/msg00220.html

Packages failing to build

A test rebuild for at least all the *-perl packages has been done on around 20080223 to find out packages failing to build. See the "Usertag" section below.

Known issues include:

the "unconditional rmdir problem"

A bug in Extutils::?MakeMaker used to create empty /usr/lib/perl5 or /usr/share/perl5 directories, and dh-make-perl templates included for a long time a debian/rules line that unconditionally rmdir'd it.

The Extutils::?MakeMaker bug was fixed for Perl 5.10, and now around 400 packages are failing to build because they try to rmdir a non-existent directory.

Suggested fix (from recent dh-make-perl templates):

See #465783 for more information about this issue.

An announcement about this with a list of the broken packages was sent to the debian-devel and debian-perl lists at 20080218.

See debian-perl mailing list archive

Update: all of these have been fixed as of 20080406.

No pseudo hashes anymore

Pseudo hashes have been deprecated for some time now, and 5.10 removes them altogether. At least libxml-encoding-perl was still using them until recently (see #458578). -- libtk-objscanner-perl can view pseudo hashes, but this feature is disabled for perl > 5.009. ( domi after a remark from gregoa)

New*() changes

From perlapi.pod:

In 5.9.3, Newx() and friends replace the older New() API, and drops the first parameter, x, a debug aid which allowed callers to identify themselves. This aid has been superseded by a new build option, PERL_MEM_LOG (see "PERL_MEM_LOG" in perlhack). The older API is still there for use in XS modules supporting older perls.

There seem to be some incompatibilites, though, and at least speedy-cgi-perl needed fixing (#462927).

DynaLoader.a is gone

Packages embedding Perl and not using ?ExtUtils::Embed::ldopts (as specified by the Perl policy) will probably look for /usr/lib/perl/5.10/auto/DynaLoader/DynaLoader.a in vain. See #463083

SWIG bindings with C++

This is seen in at least gdal and libxml-xerces-perl. Symptoms:

The fix is to regenerate the SWIG wrappers with a recent SWIG version.

Usertag

Bugs have so far been filed with these usertags:

Currently tagged bugs