This is the announcement as it was sent to debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org, January the 7th. See also: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2004/debian-devel-announce-200401/msg00002.html
Subject: Debian Perl Group founded
At November 17th, a discussion about a common problem for Debian Perl
developers was started on debian-perl@l.d.o. [1] Most developers often
realize that modules available on CPAN are not included in the Debian
archive. This hinders the packaging of Perl applications and other
modules.
After discarding the idea of automatically dumping all CPAN modules
into the Debian archive, a collective effort to improve the packaging
of Perl modules in Debian was proposed. This consists of creating new
packages of needed Modules as well as of bugfixing and updating
existing packages.
This seems to be necessary, as even many of the Perl modules included
in the unstable distribution of Debian are outdated. [2]
These thoughts lead to the founding of the Debian Perl Group, defined
through the following goals:
* Adopt orphaned Perl module packages.
* Handle the RFP of Perl modules.
* Document and improve the usage of tools like dh-make-perl.
* Help with bugs in Perl packages.
* Keeping Perl packages in the Debian archive as up-to-date as
possible.
[An updated list of these goals is available here:
http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/goals.txt]
Updated URL: https://perl-team.pages.debian.net/goals.html
An Alioth project [3] has been set up to coordinate the work. A draft
for a policy has been created [4] and is currently under discussion.
The first three new modules were packaged, checked and uploaded to the
Debian Archive at January 6th. Some issues we will work on in the next
weeks, especially orphaned packages, were submitted to our TODO list.
This is an invitation for all interested developers to join us.
The Debian Perl Group
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2003/debian-perl-200311/msg00023.html
[2] Leon Brocard assembled a list of outdated Perl modules with a script and
provided both the list and the script in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-perl/2003/debian-perl-200311/msg00043.html
[3] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-perl
[4] http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/policy.txt