Mostly quoting <20120909035351.GD3270@dennis.towiski.de> on the Gentoo-Dev-ML: I just tried (and failed) to pack a script with App::FatPacker and noticed Gentoo follows the bad example of most other distributions in removing all .packlist files from Perl module installations. These files are the only system-independent way of determining which modules belong together as part of a CPAN distribution, e.g. to find that Template::Parser belongs to the Template Toolkit proper while Template::Timer is an external add-on. FatPacker needs them to determine which modules to pack into the archive that makes a standalone script not requiring any external non-core modules, and so do various other bits such as Module::Installed. Can we please keep these? It's not like a handful of files with a couple hundred bytes per installed module at worst made any significant difference in either disk use or search times, but removing them is a Bad Idea that probably came from Debian and needlessly breaks stuff. The following would need to be changed: a) remove the patches to ExtUtils::MakeMaker that delete packlist creation from the perl and vendor targets in generated Makefiles. In particular this patch is evil: https://github.com/gentoo-perl/ExtUtils-MakeMaker/commit/af42678f775138c9c3cfb7d5a0141b0f1bb727bf#lib/ExtUtils All the single- and double-line modifications that deal with packlists need to go b) modify perl-module.eclass so it removes only empty *.bs files: --- /usr/portage/eclass/perl-module.eclass.orig 2012-09-01 08:26:44.245212715 -0600 +++ /usr/portage/eclass/perl-module.eclass 2012-09-01 10:22:10.308419665 -0600 @@ -123,7 +123,7 @@ --installdirs=vendor \ --libdoc= \ --destdir="${D}" \ - --create_packlist=0 \ + --create_packlist=1 \ "${myconf_local[@]}" einfo "perl Build.PL" "$@" perl Build.PL "$@" <<< "${pm_echovar}" \ @@ -341,8 +341,7 @@ debug-print-function $FUNCNAME "$@" perl_set_version if [[ -d ${D}/${VENDOR_ARCH} ]] ; then - find "${D}/${VENDOR_ARCH}" -type f -a \( -name .packlist \ - -o \( -name '*.bs' -a -empty \) \) -delete + find "${D}/${VENDOR_ARCH}" -type f -a \( -name '*.bs' -a -empty \) -delete find "${D}" -depth -mindepth 1 -type d -empty -delete fi } The perl_delete_packlist() function should probably not be called that any more as it only deals with DynaLoader files now but that would require changing a few ebuilds as well: dev-libs/libprelude www-apache/mod_perl net-analyzer/rrdtool Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Emerge any Perl module, say dev-perl/yaml 2. 3. Actual Results: No .packlist file installed Expected Results: A .packlist should exist in the module's directory, e.g. /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl/5.16.1/x86_64-linux-thread-multi/auto/YAML/.packlist
I just realized, this behaviour is being patched out in not one, but two places; both perl-core/EUMM and dev-lang/perl in the bundled EUMM. See bug #221179
This should be fixed starting with Perl 5.22.1 and EAPI=6.
