Some notes/TODO relating to perl interpreter maintenance.

Rebuilding packages for a major version transition

This is outdated as we now have a debomatic setup, yet to document

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://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-perl/scripts.git;a=blob;f=perl-transitions/perlapi.out 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

git-dpm use

Reverting a patch

git dpm checkout-patched
git log
<search for commit hash of patch to revert> - also note short log message
git rebase -i <commit hash>^
The commit in question should be listed first. Delete it.
git dpm dch

Other

Upstream support policy

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

5.10 (in 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:

New upstream release checklist

These are some things to consider when uploading (even a point release) new upstream version to unstable)

For a stable update

In May 2016 an update was prepared for stable including a mass-import of relevant patches from an upstream point release. This worked well, but did result in one regression (826563). In future we should consider the changes and the likelihood of breaking things, and run regression tests (for example, use the perl.debian.net infrastructure to rebuild (in jessie/jessie-proposed-updates) all packages depending on perl. This takes about a week).

Related pages