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Debian Perl Policy


Abstract

This document describes the packaging of Perl within the Debian distribution and the policy requirements for packaged Perl programs and modules.


Copyright Notice

Copyright © 1999, 2001 Software in the Public Interest

This manual is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian distribution or on the World Wide Web at The GNU Public Licence.

You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.


Contents


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 1 - About this document


This document is distributed as the perl-policy files in the Debian package debian-policy. It is also available from the Debian web mirrors at /doc/packaging-manuals/perl-policy/.


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 2 - Perl Packaging


2.1 Versions

At any given time, the package perl should represent the current stable upstream version of Perl revision 5 (see Perl 6, Appendix A).

Only one package may contain the /usr/bin/perl binary and that package must either be perl or a dependency of that package (see Base Package, Section 2.2).

Where possible, Perl should be compiled to provide binary compatibility to at least the last released package version to allow a grace period over which binary module packages may be re-built against the new package (see Binary Modules, Section 4.4.2).

The perl-base package must provide perlapi-abiname for all released package versions it is compatible with. The choice of abiname is arbitrary, but if it differs from $Config{version}, it must be specified in $Config{debian_abi}.


2.2 Base Package

In order to provide a minimal installation of Perl for use by applications without requiring the whole of Perl to be installed, the perl-base package contains the binary and a basic set of modules.

As Perl has been part of the essential set for some time and is used without dependencies by such things as package maintainer scripts, perl-base must be priority required and marked as essential.

Note that the perl-base package is intended only to provide for exceptional circumstances and the contents may change. In general, only packages which form part of the base system should use only the facilities of perl-base rather than declaring a dependency on perl.


2.3 Module Path

Perl searches three different locations for modules, referred to in this document as core in which modules distributed with Perl are installed, vendor for packaged modules and site for modules installed by the local administrator.

The module search path (@INC) in the Debian packages has been ordered to include these locations in the following order:

site (current)

Modules installed by the local administrator for the current version of Perl (see Locally Installed Modules, Chapter 3).

     /usr/local/lib/perl/version
     /usr/local/share/perl/version

Where version indicates the current Perl version ($Config{version}[1]).

vendor

Packaged modules (see Packaged Modules, Chapter 4).

     /usr/lib/perl5
     /usr/share/perl5
core

Modules included in the core Perl distribution.

     /usr/lib/perl/version
     /usr/share/perl/version
site (old)

site directories (as above) for modules installed with previously released perl packages for which the current package is binary compatible are included if present.

In each of the directory pairs above, the lib component is for binary (XS) modules, and share for architecture-independent (pure-perl) modules.


2.4 Documentation

The POD files and manual pages which do not refer to programs may be split out into a separate perl-doc package.

Manual pages distributed with Perl packages must be installed into the standard directories:

Programs

Manual pages for programs and scripts are installed into /usr/share/man/man1 with the extension .1.

Modules

Manual pages for modules are installed into /usr/share/man/man3 with the extension .3perl.


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 3 - Locally Installed Modules


3.1 Site Directories

The Perl packages must provide a mechanism for the local administrator to install modules under /usr/local but must not create or remove those directories.

Modules should be installed to the directories described above in Module Path, Section 2.3 as site (current), programs to /usr/local/bin and manual pages under /usr/local/man.


3.2 Site Installation

The following commands should be sufficient in the majority of cases for the local administrator to install modules and must create directories as required:

     perl Makefile.PL
     make install


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 4 - Packaged Modules


4.1 Vendor Directories

The installation directory for Debian modules must be different from that for core and site modules.

The current Perl packaging uses the vendor directories for this purpose, which are at present as described in Module Path, Section 2.3 as vendor.

No version subdirectory exists on these directories as the dependencies for packaged modules (see Module Dependencies, Section 4.4) should ensure that all work with the current perl package.

The Perl distribution includes many modules available separately from CPAN[2], which may have a newer version. The intent of the @INC ordering (described in Module Path, Section 2.3) is to allow such modules to be packaged to vendor which take precedence over the version in core. A packaged module which shadows a core module in this way must be a newer version.

Module packages must install manual pages into the standard directories (see Documentation, Section 2.4) using the extensions .1p and .3pm to ensure that no conflict arises where a packaged module duplicates a core module.

.packlist files should not be installed.


4.2 Module Package Names

Perl module packages should be named for the primary module provided. The naming convention is to lowercase the Perl module name, prepend, lib, change all occurrences of :: to -, and append -perl. For example:

     Foo::Bar        libfoo-bar-perl
     Foo::Bar::Baz   libfoo-bar-baz-perl
     Foo::BarBaz     libfoo-barbaz-perl

Packages which include multiple modules may additionally include provides for the additional modules using the same convention.


4.3 Vendor Installation

A module should use the following lines in the debian/rules build target[3]:

     perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor
     $(MAKE) OPTIMIZE="-O2 -g -Wall"

and this one to install the results into the temporary tree:

     $(MAKE) install DESTDIR=$(CURDIR)/debian/<tmp>

[4]


4.4 Module Dependencies


4.4.1 Architecture-Independent Modules

Architecture-independent modules which require core modules from the perl package must specify a dependency on that package.

Modules which contain explicit require version or use version statements must specify a dependency on perl or perl-base with the minimum required version, or more simply the current version.


4.4.2 Binary Modules

Binary modules must specify a dependency on either perl or perl-base with a minimum version of the perl package used to build the module, and must additionally depend on the expansion of perlapi-$Config{debian_abi} using the Config module. If $Config{debian_abi} is empty or not set, $Config{version} must be used.


4.4.3 Automating Perl Dependencies

Rather than hard-coding the dependencies into the control file, using a substitution such as ${perl:Depends} is suggested. This allows the dependencies to be determined at build time and written to the substvars file in the form perl:Depends=deps.[5]

Packages built with debhelper may use dh_perl(1) to generate this substitution automatically. This additionally requires a versioned Build-Depends (or Build-Depends-Indep) on debhelper (>= 3.0.18).


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 5 - Perl Programs


5.1 Script Magic

All packaged perl programs must start with #!/usr/bin/perl and may append such flags as are required.


5.2 Program Dependencies

Programs which require core modules from the perl package must specify a dependency on that package.

Programs which contain explicit require version or use version statements must specify a dependency on perl or perl-base with the minimum required version, or more simply the current version.

As with modules, packages using debhelper may use dh_perl(1) to automatically generate dependences (see Automating Perl Dependencies, Section 4.4.3).


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Debian Perl Policy
Chapter 6 - Programs Embedding Perl


6.1 Building Embedded Programs

Programs which embed a perl interpreter must declare a Build-Depends on libperl-dev.

The default linker options produced by

     perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts

will link against the dynamic libperl. If programs wish to link to the static library, then -lperl should be changed to /usr/lib/libperl.a in those options.


6.2 Embedded Perl Dependencies

Dependencies for programs linking against the shared Perl library will be automatically created by dpkg-shlibdeps. Note however that the shared perl library package only suggests perl-base and packages requiring any core modules from the perl package must depend upon it explicitly.


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Debian Perl Policy
Appendix A - Perl 6


The current stable upstream version at the time of this writing is 5.6.0. There is currently work in progress on the next major revision, although the specifications have yet to be finalised.

It is anticipated that when Perl 6 is released it will initially be packaged as perl6, install the binary as /usr/bin/perl6 and use different directories for packaged modules to perl:

     /usr/lib/perl6
     /usr/share/perl6

This will allow Perl 5 and 6 packages and modules (which should be packaged as libfoo-bar-perl6), to co-exist for as long as required.

At some stage in the future when Perl 6 is sufficiently mature, the package naming may be reversed such that the perl package contains Perl 6 and the current package becomes perl5.


Debian Perl Policy
Footnotes

1

see the Config module

2

http://www.perl.com/CPAN

3

The environment variable PERL_MM_OPT may be used to pass the INSTALLDIRS=vendor option in cases where Makefile.PL is not invoked directly from debian/rules

4

Replace <tmp> with the appropriate directory (nominally just tmp)

5

Please note that dependencies caused by versioned uses and on separately packaged modules are not included in this variable and must be explicitly included.


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Debian Perl Policy

version 3.9.2.0, 2011-05-01

Raphaël Hertzog
Brendan O'Dea
The Debian Policy mailing list debian-policy@lists.debian.org