On 5 December 2010 07:54, Naveed Massjouni <navee...@gmail.com> wrote: > This thread is really depressing. Personally, I like all of Shlomi's > suggestions. I can't fathom why bareword global filehandles are still > pervasive in the perl docs. But instead of the community getting to > discuss the merits of the changes and then have some kind of vote, one > maintainer with a big ego can just say, "VETO VETO VETO ... my docs > are already perfect!"
I think there is a difference in modifying someone elses documentation, and writing a totally new doc. I also think there is a big difference between patches to code which fix bugs or add functionality, and patches to documentation that is not actually wrong, but instead of a style no longer in fashion. To me it is a bit like suggesting that Shakespeare needs to be "modernized" because of the archaic English he used. However, if you, or Shlomi think you can write a better perlipc.pod from scratch, then you should do so, or any other doc. If we think it is qualitatively superior then we would probably replace the existing version. More likely we would end up with two docs. And the community would be richer for it. So I think we are right in respecting a given documents artistic rights to have their vision presented as they wished, within reason. We can always decide not to use the doc at all if we feel they are being unreasonable. I doubt you would get a consensus for such an extreme action amongst the committers though. I think we generally dont feel as strongly about these changes as you seem to. Although I respect your reasons for doing so. > Is that how things work in the perl community? Sometimes yes. We have a long tradition of accepting there is a role for a "benevolent dictator" in our community, as without one, we all too easily descend into long tedius arguments that get us nowhere. Like this one has verged upon. (I think Abigails suggested "example caveat" is a productive step that means we have not /quite/ verged into the total waste of time category.) > What incentive would I or Shlomi or anyone else have to spend their > time to try to improve the docs if this is how things work. We all have different incentives. I would hope that you dont feel that a predicate on your contributing is the right to change anything you wish however you wish. That is not how it works. No matter how much I wish it did sometimes. I hope you stay positive about contributing to perl, and find other subjects where you can do so. We have a lot more to look into than Tom's docs. cheers, Yves -- perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"
