Subject: perl

From: Todd Tyrone Fries <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 15:19:21 -0500 (CDT)

I've a friend who is installing debian and he asked me to ask these questions..

why does the perl package depend on csh?

why does 'libc-dev' have a conflicting dependency with 'libc5' ??  It won't
let him install libc5-dev for some odd reasion.

--
Todd Fries .. [email-masked]

---

From: Andy Dougherty <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 00:41:36 -0400 (EDT)

> why does the perl package depend on csh?

Perl uses 'csh' for filename globbing (that is, for <*.*> sort of
constructs.)  Yes, that's strange behavior, and the dependency probably
will eventually be removed, but not anytime soon.

    Andy Dougherty		[email-masked]
    Dept. of Physics
    Lafayette College, Easton PA 18042

---

From: Philippe Troin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 02:02:22 -0700

> why does the perl package depend on csh?

Duh, sure about that one ? Never seen it....

> let him install libc5-dev for some odd reasion.

This one is fixed by upgrading to dpkg 1.2.11elf (available from
ftp://ftp.debian.org/pub/debian/Debian-1.1-fixes/binary ).

Phil.

---

From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 08:53:08 -0400

Hi Todd --

> let him install libc5-dev for some odd reasion.

dpkg --info libc5-dev_5.2.18-9.deb
yields

.
.
.
DEPENDS: libc5 (=5.2.18-9)
CONFLICTS: libc (<<4.6.27-11), libc-dev, pthreads-dev
PROVIDES: libc-dev, pthreads1-dev, pthreads-dev
RECOMMENDED: binutils, gcc
.
.
.

I don't see the conflict between libc5-dev and libc5, just a conflict
between libc5-dev and the version 4 libraries (libc and libc-dev),
(as well as a conflict between libc5-dev and pthreads-dev).

Susan Kleinmann

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From: [email-masked] (Gilbert Ramirez)
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 23:53:49 -0500 (CDT)

> why does the perl package depend on csh?

You can glob filenames in perl.... 

@filenames = <*>;
print @filenames;

But perl doesn't have the globbing built in. It actually calls csh to do
the magic for it.

> let him install libc5-dev for some odd reasion.

dunno.

--gilbert

______________________________________________________________________
Gilbert Ramirez Jr.                     [email-masked]
University of Texas                     http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram
Health Science Center at San Antonio    University Health System

---

From: Ed Donovan <[email-masked]>
Date: 23 Aug 1996 01:46:24 -0400

> will eventually be removed, but not anytime soon.

But, but...I thought it was noted, here or in the bug reports, that the
csh-usage was an optional include, and was being taken out.  Maybe this
is a Debian stable/unstable issue?, because my current perl, and the
current rex/binary-i386 Packages file say:

Package: perl
Version: 5.003-2
Pre-Depends: libc5, libgdbm1, libdb1  

I've never had csh on this system and this version went in fine, works
fine.  Darren, are you around to confirm that this is behind us?  

-- 

Ed Donovan			[email-masked]

---

From: Andy Dougherty <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 11:57:15 -0400 (EDT)

> Pre-Depends: libc5, libgdbm1, libdb1  

It is possible to configure perl such that it doesn't require csh.
Running 

	/usr/bin/perl -V:d_csh

shows that Darren has, in fact, done just that (for perl5.003-02),
so that for perl5.003-02, you don't need csh.  It may well be the case
that it was needed for previous versions such as the original user
was wondering about.

My remarks above (about removing the use of csh from Perl) were actually
referring to the upstream perl sources, though I see that's certainly not
obvious.   Sorry for the confusion.