With or without .packlist?

[Steve Wills]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 10:13:42AM +0200, Frederic Culot wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > With the staging support, we can properly decide what we do pack or not inside
> > the packages, the question now is do we keep the .packlist (in that case they
> > need to be fixed because they are full of stage path :)) or should we just drop
> > those files and no package them at all.
> > 
> > It seems to me that most of the other operating systems are not packaging.
> > 
> > I have no clue what what those .packlist files are useful for, so I do have no
> > opinion, would be nice to get a perl@ claim on this soon, as we either need to
> > fix them or nuke them.
> > 
> > btw: sunpoet has a PR I'm sitting one because of that:
> > http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/182806
> > 
> > regards,
> > Bapt
> 
> >From my own experience (which is far from extensive in this matter), the
> .packlist files are used for two different purposes.
> 
> The first one is related to the management of modules via ExtUtils::*
> utilities (ExtUtils::Installed and ExtUtils::Packlist are the ones I am
> aware of), such as inventory management of modules. 
> 
> The second one is related to the building of standalone package, via
> modules such as App::FatPacker. One may use those to bundle a script and
> all its dependencies into a single standalone package, and to do so the
> .packlist files are relied upon.
> 
> For the first use, I believe the .packlist files can safely be removed,
> because FreeBSD already provides all the necessary tools to perform such
> inventory management. But for the second use I am not sure... If we are
> to remove .packlist files we may end up with users complaining they
> could not bundle their scripts anymore (I already heard such complains
> from gentoo users for instance). But there might by other ways to
> package modules and dependencies which do not require .packlist files to
> be present.
> 
> >From my own perspective, I believe the benefits we would get from
> removing those .packlist files (mainly easier integration with staging)
> exceeds the drawbacks, and I would agree to drop them.

I'm somewhat on the fence, but if fixing the paths is troublesome, dropping
them is fine, IMHO.

Steve