DH_PERL(1)

💖 DH_PERL 💖

okay bestie, so this is dh_perl from the Debhelper manual (section 1, we love a classic) — and she's honestly doing so much for you 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

dh_perl — calculates Perl dependencies and cleans up after MakeMaker. yes literally both. she does the math and the tidying. main character behaviour fr fr 👑

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

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

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

so dh_perl is a debhelper program, and her whole job is generating the ${perl:Depends} substitutions and adding them into substvars files. iconic, no notes. 💅

she'll go looking at all the Perl scripts and modules in your package, and use everything she finds to generate a dependency on perl or perlapi. then that dependency gets substituted into your package's control file — wherever you dropped the token ${perl:Depends}. so like, put the token there and she fills it in. that's the vibe. ✨

oh and also? she cleans up empty directories that MakeMaker can generate when installing Perl modules. queen of the after-party cleanup 🧚

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -d — okay so in some specific cases you might want to depend on perl-base instead of the full perl package. if that's you, pass -d and dh_perl will generate a dependency on the correct base package instead. this is only necessary for some packages that are included in the base system. lowkey niche but valid 💜

ngl bestie, heads up: 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. so don't come crying to me when there's nothing there 😭

• -V — by default, scripts and architecture independent modules don't depend on any specific version of perl. the -V option makes the current version of the perl package (or perl-base if you're also passing -d) be specified. so like, pin it down. lock her in. 🔥
• library dirs — 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 🫶 by default she only checks the vendorlib and vendorarch directories. so if you're being ✨different✨, tell her where to look.

🌈 CONFORMS TO 🌈

• Debian policy, version 3.8.3
• Perl policy, version 1.20

💖 SEE ALSO 💖

• debhelper(7)

this program is a part of debhelper. found family, your honour 🥹

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org> — thank you for your service, legend 🎀

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and that's the whole page bestie, you ate that 💅 dh_perl is version 14.5ubuntu1, dated 2026-09-21, and that's the tea. go forth and let her handle your Perl deps, she's got you 🦋🌸