Comment 19 for bug 13917

Take ownership, just to get you up to date. The response from Debian, where this bug should be fixed by all accounts, was "CPAN is not supported." You see, they don't think this a problem and they use other like violations to justify this one. Hacking stuff into a module for them, ensures that other things that use that module will get the behavior Debian wants. Which sits opposite to the genius of a perl package management system, and other generally supported means of doing this through subclassing, and forking.

In perl the mindset is do whatever you want, just do it such that it doesn't break whatever I want. In Debian the mindset is do what I want and if it breaks I don't care, and if you replace it you're unsupported.

I've submitted an offer to subclass and change dependencies on Debian to an XML::SAX::Debian, but that doesn't solve Debian's desire to screw up things not created by them. There was talk about changing the @INC path for all base-debian-scripts, but again this hasn't been done (as far as I can see), and it is still broken by the above.

The issue here is simple: either Debian has the right to alter fundamental behaviors of things they haven't created and publish them under the same name to break things that rely on them, or Debian doesn't. Debian continues to argue they do. This isn't a massive technical bug, it is a minor technical bug layered on top of a huge political one whereby all of the Debian perl team is retarded. They're behavior of /wanting/ to break my system and telling me that theirs holds precedence in light of an option to have two systems that can play together is insulting at best.