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Bug 172815

Summary: g-cpan unnecessarily upgrades ebuilds
Product: Gentoo Linux Reporter: Guido Flohr <guido>
Component: Current packagesAssignee: Gentoo Perl team <perl>
Status: RESOLVED INVALID    
Severity: normal CC: hkmaly
Priority: High    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Package list:
Runtime testing required: ---

Description Guido Flohr 2007-03-30 17:29:59 UTC
g-cpan exaggerates in the required version numbers of other cpan modules when generating e-builds.

I have g-cpan 0.14.0 with a manually applied patch that fixes bug 170132 (I ignore recommended modules form META.yml).

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
g-cpan -g Tree-Simple-VisitorFactory
Actual Results:  
cat /usr/local/portage/g-cpan/Tree-Simple-VisitorFactory/Tree-Simple-VisitorFactory-0.10.ebuild 
...
DEPEND="
    >=virtual/perl-Test-Simple-0.70
    >=virtual/perl-Scalar-List-Utils-1.19
    >=dev-perl/Test-Exception-0.25
    >=virtual/perl-File-Spec-3.24
    >=dev-perl/Tree-Simple-1.17
"
...

Expected Results:  
DEPEND="
    >=virtual/perl-Test-Simple-0.47
    >=virtual/perl-Scalar-List-Utils-1.10
    >=dev-perl/Test-Exception-0.15
    >=virtual/perl-File-Spec-0.60
    >=dev-perl/Tree-Simple-1.10
"

These values would correspond to the dependencies given in the Makefile.PL that ships with Tree-Simple-VisitorFactory.  Instead, g-cpan, always creates a dependency for the very latest version available on CPAN.

I will take the Test::More dependency as an example.  Test::More is included in Test::Simple.  I have version 0.67 installed which is more than enough for Tree-Simple-VisitorFactory.

emerge --search Test-Simple

...
*  perl-core/Test-Simple
      Latest version available: 0.66
      Latest version installed: 0.67
      Size of files: 74 kB
      Homepage:      http://search.cpan.org/~mschwern/Test-Simple-0.66/
      Description:   Basic utilities for writing tests
      License:       Artistic

*  virtual/perl-Test-Simple
      Latest version available: 0.67
      Latest version installed: 0.67
      Size of files: 0 kB
      Homepage:      http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/perl/
      Description:   Virtual for Test-Simple
      License:       GPL-2

The behavior of g-cpan described here will often lead to (unnecessary) dependencies for very new modules which are either not available at all or - even worse - which are masked.

I usually have at least one hundred CPAN modules installed on my system, and every emerge --update --deep is a nightmare because of this.  There are always new problems with non-existing or masked ebuilds.
Comment 1 Guido Flohr 2007-10-24 20:31:39 UTC
I entered this bug half a year ago, and I actually think that this is a major flaw in g-cpan.  95 percent of the packages listed in my /etc/portage/package.keywords are g-cpan packages, and actually listed there only because of this bug.  Some feedback on the bug would be highly appreciated here.

Cheers,
Guido
Comment 2 Yuval Yaari (RETIRED) gentoo-dev 2008-10-04 18:13:38 UTC
Doesn't happen with 0.15.0-r1.
I can't find a corresponding commit in the svn logs (admittedly, I only took a quick glance), so I'm resolving INVALID, not FIXED.