note
stefp
MandrakeSoft takes Perl very seriously because it is at the heart of the install process of their distro.
So here what Garcia-Suarez, a Perl pumpking who works at MandrakeSoft, said to me on #perlfr, modulo what has been "lost in translation".
I have filled a few blanks too.
<p/>
The Mandrake distro is divided in 2 "media". The <tt>main</tt> media is supported by MandrakeSoft; <tt>contrib</tt> is not.
Additionally, there is <tt>update</tt> that contains security update.
Finally, there is <tt>plf</tt>, that
contains rpms packaged by the
<a href="http://plf.zarb.org/">
Penguin liberation Front</a>. These packages have a dubious or incompatible legal status that makes them ineligible for distribution by Mandrakesoft.<p/>
The core of Perl is split in 4 rpms: <tt>perl-base</tt>, <tt>perl-doc</tt>, <tt>perl</tt>, <tt>perl-devel</tt>.
The <tt>perl-base</tt> rpm contains a minimum perl distro useful in the boot process where the whole Perl would be too big.
The <tt>perl</tt> rpm is the rest of core perl minus <tt>perl-doc</tt>, that contains the doc and <tt>perl-devel</tt> that contains the C headers.<p/>
Rafael is the packager of Perl and of 119 Perl modules as testified by:
<tt> rpmmon -q rgarciasuarez@mandrakesoft.com | grep perl- | wc -l</tt><br/>
Other Perl modules are packaged by other people.
The policy is to update immediately the <tt>update</tt> media
when there is a security update for a perl module.
Also, <tt>cooker</tt>, the experimental distro is fairly
up to date. I am using cooker and
does <tt>urpmi.update -a; urpmi --auto-select</tt> to keep
my host up to date and I regularly see Perl related updates in the logs.<p/>
There is a lot of stuff that is proper to Mandrake
but can be of a larger interest. For example
the MDK::Common package contained in the rpm <tt>perl-MDK-common</tt>.
The <tt>urpmi</tt> command is a Perl script that is updated by rgs almost daily (but this is relevant only for people under cooker).<p/>
Also, in the next major release MandrakeSoft will probably distribute the non threaded
version of Perl as default. The rational is that threaded Perl is slow and buggy.
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