DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / debhelper / dh_perl.1.en
DH_PERL(1) Debhelper DH_PERL(1)

dh_perl - calculates Perl dependencies and cleans up after MakeMaker

dh_perl [debhelper options] [-d] [library dirs ...]

dh_perl is a debhelper program that is responsible for generating the ${perl:Depends} substitutions and adding them to substvars files.

The program will look at Perl scripts and modules in your package, and will use this information to generate a dependency on perl or perlapi. The dependency will be substituted into your package's control file wherever you place the token ${perl:Depends}.

dh_perl also cleans up empty directories that MakeMaker can generate when installing Perl modules.

In some specific cases you may want to depend on perl-base rather than the full perl package. If so, you can pass the -d option to make dh_perl generate a dependency on the correct base package. This is only necessary for some packages that are included in the base system.

Note that this flag may cause no dependency on perl-base to be generated at all. perl-base is Essential, so its dependency can be left out, unless a versioned dependency is needed.

By default, scripts and architecture independent modules don't depend on any specific version of perl. The -V option causes the current version of the perl (or perl-base with -d) package to be specified.
If your package installs Perl modules in non-standard directories, you can make dh_perl check those directories by passing their names on the command line. It will only check the vendorlib and vendorarch directories by default.

Debian policy, version 3.8.3

Perl policy, version 1.20

debhelper(7)

This program is a part of debhelper.

Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org>

2023-01-02 13.11.4