Some notes/TODO relating to perl interpreter maintenance.

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/perl-maintainers/2011-February/001678.html is Niko's Feb 2011 post about work needed.

Dominic Hargreaves will coordinate the perl 5.12/perl 5.14 transition. Please use perl@packages.debian.org as the main contact point.

5.12 is in unstable, repository at http://git.debian.org/?p=perl/perl-5.12.git

5.14 is not uploaded yet, repository at http://git.debian.org/?p=perl/perl-5.14.git

Work related to perl 5.12

Work related to Perl 5.14

Rebuilding packages

The main complication is that we need unofficial binNMUs of the perlapi-* and libperl reverse dependencies so that they can be used as build dependencies for rebuilding the rest.

The scripts at http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-perl/scripts/perl-5.10-transition/perlapi.out?view=markup can be used to determine the necessary binNMUs; the order also matters because the dependencies form a chain.

Example: libdevel-caller-perl is needed by libdevel-lexalias-perl, libpadwalker-perl is needed by libdevel-caller-perl etc.

Other issues

List based on http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/perl-maintainers/2010-March/001121.html

TopGit use

Upstream support policy

http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2011-04/msg00352.html

5.10 (in lenny and squeeze) will be desupported by upstream at the release of 5.14. According to my reading of that announcement this will effectively end security support for 5.10 at the same time (since 5.10.0 was released more than three years ago).

Package maintenance policies

Bug tagging notes

We should probably define some useful usertags. Some initial thoughts: