lots of pdl messages on Xenial Negative repeat count does nothing

[jan]

Perl 5.21.x and higher (as included in xenial) is not compatible with pdl < 0.016.
Therefore, many programs with pdl run on xenial will print lots of lines "Negative repeat count does nothing".

https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=100228

Could the pdl in xenial LTS be upgraded to 0.016 to make it workable ?

[jan (jan-ubuntu-h-i-s)]

Naively installing the yakkety package does not work.
5.22.1-9 It would help if the perl depencency would just be a little lower.
And there is a problem with install-docs when trying that on xenial.

sudo dpkg --install pdl_2.016-4_amd64.deb

(Reading database ... 1136894 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack pdl_2.016-4_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking pdl (1:2.016-4) over (1:2.007-5) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of pdl:
 pdl depends on perl (>= 5.22.2-1); however:
  Version of perl on system is 5.22.1-9.
 pdl depends on perlapi-5.22.2; however:
  Package perlapi-5.22.2 is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package pdl (--install):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Processing triggers for doc-base (0.10.7) ...
Processing 1 changed doc-base file...
Error in `/usr/share/doc-base/pdl', line 14: all `Format' sections are invalid.
Note: `install-docs --verbose --check file_name' may give more details about the above error.
Registering documents with scrollkeeper...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ...
Processing triggers for menu (2.1.47ubuntu1) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 pdl

[jan (jan-ubuntu-h-i-s)]

Alternatively, change the following code:

diff -r1.1 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/perl5/5.22/PDL/Core.pm
1546,1547c1546,1549
< my($s) = ',' x ( ($dim > $pdl->getndims) ? ($pdl->getndims) : ($dim) );
< $s .= '*1,' x ( $dim-$pdl->getndims );
---
> # Avoid negative repeat count warning that came with 5.21 and later.
> my $dim_diff = $dim - $pdl->getndims;
> my($s) = ',' x ( $dim_diff > 0 ? $pdl->getndims : $dim );
> $s .= '*1,' x ( $dim_diff > 0 ? $dim_diff : 0 );

[Ed J (mohawk2)]

This patch was in PDL as of 26 Feb 2015, and main-released to CPAN as 2.008 on 24 May 2015. Seeing as it's 2021 and CPAN's PDL is 2.038, can this bug be closed?