[Koha-devel] Adopting CPAN and Carton

[Julian Maurice]

Hi,

As you said it is already feasible and very easy to do. So what would it 
mean to "adopt CPAN and Carton" ?

Le 05/06/2020 à 08:10, dcook at prosentient.com.au a écrit :
> Now that I think about it, embedding the Perl modules in the Debian package
> could be problematic due to dependencies on C libraries. (Currently building
> Text::Bidi on an OpenSUSE system and it's taking forever.)
> 
> I actually found it pretty challenging to read replies interweaved in
> emails, so I might not respond to all that.
> 
> But yeah I could see the most likely option being keeping the Debian
> packages the way they are and just having an alternative Carton style. All
> that is needed for it really is changing the PERL5LIB environmental
> variable, so it would be easy enough to do.
> 
> David Cook
> Systems Librarian
> Prosentient Systems
> 72/330 Wattle St
> Ultimo, NSW 2007
> Australia
> 
> Office: 02 9212 0899
> Online: 02 8005 0595
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Victor Grousset/tuxayo <victor at tuxayo.net>
> Sent: Friday, 5 June 2020 3:15 PM
> To: dcook at prosentient.com.au; 'Koha Devel'
> <koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org>
> Subject: Re: Adopting CPAN and Carton
> 
> Hi o/
> 
> On 20-06-05 02:18, dcook at prosentient.com.au wrote:
>> What are people’s thoughts on CPAN and Carton (the Perl version of
>> Bundler, Composer, NPM, etc)?
> 
> I hope that something like that would be on our reach. And that it will make
> the majority of the work done to support other Linux distributions, which
> would be amazing!
> 
>> I like the idea as a way of more easily managing Perl dependencies
>> regardless of Linux distribution and version; in other words, we could
>> provide the same dependencies regardless of being on Debian
>> Jessie/Debian Stretch/Debian Buster or Ubuntu or Fedora or RHEL or
> OpenSUSE.
>>
>>   
>>
>> I suppose the difficulty is how we do a community-friendly deployment?
>> I see two main options:
>>
>>   1. Have the Debian package run “carton install” automatically during
>>      install/upgrade
>>       1. This could be error prone and difficult to support…  2. Have
>> the Koha Debian Package Manager run “carton install” when
>>      building the package, and embed the Perl modules in the Koha package
>>       1. It’s unknown how much this would increase the size of the Koha
>>          package
> 
> Interesting, I hope such an unified way will be possible.
> If not, is the following a valid option?
> The current way of managing the perl dependencies for Debian doesn't change.
> And a carton way of managing the perl dependencies will coexist. (does it
> mean just maintaining the cpanfile? I guess I'm very very wrong here) And
> packages for the other distros will use carton.
> 
> It would depend of which is more work:
> Integrating and maintaining the use of carton in the Debian packages Or
> Maintaining the "full" Debian packages in parallel.
> 
> And also how much is valued the fact that for Debian, the perl deps comes
> from the repo? (we could keep the versions in sync with Debian, see [1])
> Subparts of this:
> - value of Debian patches
> - anything else???
> 
> 
>> I think retaining Debian packages is important, because we have a
>> number of non-Perl dependencies, and the Debian packages provide a lot
>> of very useful automation.
> 
> Thank for addressing the question of "If we can use Carton, why have
> packages at all?"
> I trust you and the others for that ^^" I have no idea of whether or not
> packages are the best option compared to others. Does anyone have feedback
> about the handling of applications with a lot of deps in other languages
> than Perl? (that have something similar to Carton)
> 
> 
> 
>> Personally, I’m moving away from packaging Perl dependencies as Debian
>> packages for non-Koha projects, because it makes porting the projects
>> to a newer version of the same OS much more difficult.
> 
>> I know using Debian’s Perl packages have a lot of advantages, as
>> they’re tested, reviewed, and patched, but I think it might be time to
>> consider a change.
> 
> [1]The cpanfile could still evolve in sync with the Debian package versions
> of the perl libs.
> That doesn't address the point "patched" => are there a lot of patched perl
> packages in Debian?
> i.e. enough so that even getting the same versions (as the one in Debian
> stable or oldstable) from CPAN will lead to issues compared to getting them
> from the Debian packages?
> 
> 
> 
> Unrelated idea: if we end up not using the Debian perl packages and not
> syncing the versions pulled from CPAN with those in Debian, here is how we
> could manage perl deps.
> We could have a script that would edit the cpanfile to bump the major
> version of one package. Or set it to the latest version.
> And run the tests. And if the tests are alright, keep the new package
> version and try updating the next package.
> This way (hopefully) most of the update work of perl deps would be done.
> Edge cases will be dealt with manually.
> 
> Even if we don't directly need it, it could be a nice tool to detect
> regressions in our upstream deps way before they fall on us!
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Victor Grousset/tuxayo
> 
> 
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-- 
Julian Maurice
BibLibre