<h1class="post-title">About Perl packages in Gentoo</h1>
<spanclass="post-date">11 Sep 2015</span>
<p>In this post I wish to explain a bit about Perl related ebuilds in Gentoo and how to update from perl-core to virtual/perl without conflicts.</p>
<p>First of all the core distribution of Perl is included in <ahref="https://packages.gentoo.org/package/dev-lang/perl">dev-lang/Perl</a> along with <ahref="http://perldoc.perl.org/index-modules-A.html">modules</a>.</p>
<p>The <ahref="https://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/perl-core/">perl-core category</a> in portage contains ebuilds for perl modules, some of which are included in the core perl distibution. The perl-core ebuilds overrides the perl-core modules such that you can update them without recompiling dev-lang/Perl.</p>
<p>Each perl-core module has a corrensponding virtual/perl-* package. The virtual category is used by portage when emerging to take into account that a module can be either provided by dev-lang/perl package or found in perl-core category.</p>
<p>So, what to do in case of blocks when upgrading your Gentoo machine?</p>
<p>Perl-cleaner is a package provided to get rid of these blocks and to migrate from perl-core to virtual/perl-*.</p>