[rt-users] Text::Template versions (was Re: [Rt-announce] RT 3.8.2 Released)

[Adam Clarke]

On 09/01/2009, at 5:44 AM, Shawn M Moore wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 08, 2009 at 05:41:48PM +0000, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 07, 2009 at 09:34:44AM -0500, Kevin Falcone wrote:
>>
>>> * newer Text::Template which claims to have fixed the T:: cleanup,
>>> otherwise
>>> scrips in batch stage may be delayed [sartak]
>>
>> I note you have declared a dependency on Text::Template 1.45.
>>
>> Examining the changes between Text::Template 1.44 (which is nearly 6
>> years old) and 1.45 (released last year) I can't see a single code
>> change. The only things that changes are the documentation, package
>> metadata, version numbers, and test suite. There's also no changelog
>> entry for 1.45 in the distribution.
>>
>> What am I missing? Could the dependency be relaxed to some other  
>> version
>> of Text::Template? I can't see any particularly relevant entry in the
>> T::T changelog, but I don't quite understand the above RT changelog
>> entry either.

...

> Text::Template 1.44 had the important bugfix. From its README:
>
>        _scrubpkg, which was responsible for eptying out temporary
>        packages after the module had done with them, wasn't always
>        working; the result was memory-leaks in long-running
>        applications.  This should be fixed now, and there is a test
>        in the test suite for it.
>
> When bumping a dependency I generally depend on the latest and  
> greatest
> for more bugfixes, documentation, etc.
>
> You're right that in this particular case we could have depended on  
> just
> 1.44, since 1.45 appears to have only very minor doc and test  
> tweaks. If
> you have 1.44 and upgrading a module is difficult, then I suppose you
> could get away without upgrading it.

I think that Dominic's point is that choosing the newest package to  
depend on
when the required fix was actually in a much earlier release has the
consequence of making the dependancy one which is unlikely to be  
satisfied
from the system libraries whereas the earlier version would have been.

For example this is what Debian 4.0 Etch (currently stable) has  
packaged.

# apt-cache show libtext-template-perl
Package: libtext-template-perl
Priority: extra
Section: perl
Installed-Size: 172
Maintainer: Scott M. Dier <sdier at debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 1.44-1.1
Depends: perl (>= 5.6.0-16)
Filename: pool/main/libt/libtext-template-perl/libtext-template- 
perl_1.44-1.1_all.deb
Size: 54024
MD5sum: 7daed0bed4940c9d4c8f9e38a4aa6f53
SHA1: d7fea5528a38bfdf9f8ef5d8dc0dbc192771fa3b
SHA256: ad9bf0b565c23b608979551504961be5df183273d80d91c6bfa667b12eef2890
Description: Text::Template perl module
...