Re: licensing issues

David Grove <[email protected]> writes:

> However, maybe you can find out something for us. Specifically, why
> isn't Perl 5.6 a part of "official" Debian in this latest release, and
> 5.005_03 still is? Is Debian slow at getting this out, or is there a
> more obvious reason from the Perl end? (I'm being provocative, not
> insulting.)

Because tons of the most critical stuff in Debian is written in Perl,
including key pieces of its packaging system, making upgrading Perl
without breaking the entire system an... interesting problem.
Particularly given that Perl was previously handled by the alternatives
system and they're trying to switch away from that.

5.6 is in unstable, I believe, and they're busily sorting out the
dependency issues and upgrade issues and it will be out when it's out.

Upgrading Perl on a Debian system is like upgrading libc, and this
particular upgrade, due to internal structural changes, is even more
complicated than that.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>