perl5 .packlist files

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jun 20, 2012, at 08:23, Daniel J. Luke wrote:

> On Jun 17, 2012, at 5:38 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>> Does anybody know what purpose the .packlist files in p5 modules serve?
> 
> ExtUtils::Installed uses them.
> 
> They're probably not super-useful when you've got MacPorts that can also tell you what is installed - but I wouldn't be surprised if there is stuff out there that depends on them being there.
> 
>> We have block in the perl5 portgroup and in several individual ports copied from there which fixes the .packlist files by removing the destroot path from them, but do we even need the files at all? The archlinux perl packaging guidelines, for example, say .packlist files should be deleted, along with perllocal.pod files.
> 
> 
> IIRC debian doesn't install them either.
> 
> Are they causing a problem for us?

I was dealing with a port that installed an unmodified .packlist. Unmodified .packlists contain the path to the destroot, so they're not useful. Since nobody had submitted a bug report about that I was guessing that maybe we don't need .packlists at all. If not, we could delete them. Alternately, if we should keep them, then we must fix them so that they don't contain the destroot path. The perl5 portgroup already does this, but there are other ports that make perl modules and .packlists that have not copied that block of code.