At any given time, the package perl should represent the current stable upstream version of Perl revision 5 (see ).

Only one package may contain the /usr/bin/perl binary and that package must either be perl or a dependency of that package (see ).

Where possible, Perl should be compiled to provide binary compatibility to at least the last released package version to allow a grace period over which binary module packages may be re-built against the new package (see ).

The perl-base package must provide perlapi-version for all released versions it is compatible with.

In order to provide a minimal installation of Perl for use by applications without requiring the whole of Perl to be installed, the perl-base package contains the binary and a basic set of modules.

As Perl is currently used by such things as update-alternatives and some package maintainer scripts, it must be priority required and marked as essential.

Note that the perl-base package is intended only to provide for exceptional circumstances and the contents may change. In general only packages which form part of the base system should declare a dependency on perl-base rather than perl.

Perl searches three different locations for modules, referred to in this document as core in which modules distributed with Perl are installed, vendor for packaged modules and site for modules installed by the local administrator.

The module search path (@INC) in the Debian packages has been ordered to include these locations in the following order: site (current)

Modules installed by the local administrator for the current version of Perl (see ). /usr/local/lib/perl/version /usr/local/share/perl/version Where version indicates the current Perl version ($Config{version}see the Config module).

The POD files and manual pages which do not refer to programs may be split out into a separate perl-doc package.

Manual pages distributed with Perl packages must be installed into the standard directories: Programs

Manual pages for programs and scripts are installed into /usr/share/man/man1 with the extension .1.

The Perl packages must provide a mechanism for the local administrator to install modules under /usr/local but must not create or remove those directories.

Modules should be installed to the directories described above in as site (current), programs to /usr/local/bin and manual pages under /usr/local/man.

The following commands should be sufficient in the majority of cases for the local administrator to install modules and must create directories as required: perl Makefile.PL make install

The installation directory for Debian modules must be different from that for core and site modules.

The current Perl packaging uses the vendor directories for this purpose, which are at present as described in as vendor.

No version subdirectory exists on these directories as the dependencies for packaged modules (see ) should ensure that all work with the current perl package.

The Perl distribution includes many modules available separately from CPAN, which may have a newer version. The intent of the @INC ordering (described in ) is to allow such modules to be packaged to vendor which take precedence over the version in core. A packaged module which shadows a core module in this way must be a newer version.

Module packages must install manual pages into the standard directories (see ) using the extensions .1p and .3pm to ensure that no conflict arises where a packaged module duplicates a core module.

.packlist files should not be installed.

Perl module packages should be named for the primary module provided. The naming convention for module Foo::Bar is libfoo-bar-perl. Packages which include multiple modules may additionally include provides for those modules using the same convention.

A module should use the following lines in the debian/rules build targetThe environment variable PERL_MM_OPT may be used to pass the INSTALLDIRS=vendor option in cases where Makefile.PL is not invoked directly from debian/rules: perl Makefile.PL INSTALLDIRS=vendor $(MAKE) OPTIMIZE="-O2 -g -Wall" and this one to install the results into the temporary tree: $(MAKE) install PREFIX=$(CURDIR)/debian/tmp/usr

A Build-Depends on perl (>= 5.6.0-16) is required.

All packaged perl programs must start with #!/usr/bin/perl and may append such flags as are required.

Programs which require core modules from the perl package must specify a dependency on that package.

Programs which contain explicit require version or use version statements must specify a dependency on perl or perl-base with the minimum required version, or more simply the current version.

As with modules, packages using debhelper may use to automatically generate dependences (see ).

Programs which embed a perl interpreter must declare a Build-Depends on libperl-dev.

The default linker options produced by perl -MExtUtils::Embed -e ldopts will link against the dynamic libperl. If programs wish to link to the static library, then -lperl should be changed to /usr/lib/libperl.a in those options.

Dependencies for programs linking against the shared Perl library will be automatically created by dpkg-shlibdeps. Note however that the shared perl library package only suggests perl-base and packages requiring any core modules from the perl package must depend upon it explicitly.