[apparmor] Deprecating the Perl bindings?

[Christian Boltz]

Hello,

Am Dienstag, 7. September 2021, 08:50:27 CEST schrieb intrigeri:
> As far as I can tell, in the upstream code base, aa-notify was the
> only thing that depended on the Perl bindings to libapparmor.
> It's been ported to Python so that's not the case anymore.
> 
> With my Debian hat on, I can say that shipping the Perl bindings
> (libapparmor-perl) makes some stuff more complicated, for example for
> adding cross-building support. So I'm considering dropping them:
> https://bugs.debian.org/993565
> 
> What would be the drawbacks of dropping the Perl bindings upstream?
> 
> Are we aware of code that uses them? In openSUSE tooling, perhaps?

Historically the YaST2 AppArmor module used the perl bindings (and even 
the old perl modules), but since several years YaST is baiscally a 
graphical frontend to   aa-genprof --json   etc. - and that way solved 
more than one problem. I was even able to do a "remote bugfix" to YaST 
by fixing something in aa-genprof ;-)

I'm not sure if other packages use the perl bindings (unfortunately I 
can only easily find out what depends on AppArmor, but not individually 
for the perl-apparmor subpackage). At least on my laptop, I could 
uninstall perl-apparmor without complaints.

> Are we confident they'll keep working, even though we don't actively
> use them upstream anymore?

Well, we didn't get any bugreports ;-) which can mean
- it works
- nobody uses it   or
- it's broken and nobody uses it

> If we want to drop them upstream, what would be a suitable deprecation
> process and timeline? Would it be sufficient to announce this on this
> mailing list and drop them in the next major release?

As long as it doesn't case lots of work, I'd tend to keep the perl 
bindings upstream. This is not a strong vote, so if we want to add a 
deprecation note (so that we can say "told you so" whenever the perl 
bindings cause us headaches), I'm also fine with that.

At the same time - if the perl bindings cause you major headaches on 
Debian, feel free to drop --with-perl.


Regards,

Christian Boltz
-- 
Journaling erhöht die Stabilität/Konsistenz des Dateisystems nach einem
nötigen Filesystem-Check, der ohne Journal ein fremdes Kinderzimmer
aufräumen muss ohne zu wissen, wo der Scheiß eigentlich hin soll,
während er mit Journal einen Zettel vor der Tür findet, wo die Rotznase
ihre Sachen zu finden wünscht. [Holger Marzen]
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