At 08:12 PM 2001-08-20 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
>Sean M Burke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> BTW, all are reminded that the coming Saturday is the end of the
>> two-week period for comments on draft 1 of perlpod and perlpodspec.
>> After that, I go off and come up with the final drafts.
>>
>> Anyone making recommendations on draft 1 after Saturday will be met with
>> icy stares and dismissive gestures. And mocking. Always the mocking.
>
>Um, people's schedules don't necessarily follow your time constraints.
>I'm rather uncomfortable with this sort of deadline being set; this summer
>has been incredibly busy for me and I'm not going to have time to take a
>detailed look at this until at *least* the middle of September, possibly
>October.
I sense a crucial divergence between what I'm saying, and what you think
I'm saying.
I did not say that as of Saturday, I would declare perlpod and perlpodspec
done forever, and reject any further comments on them, under penalty of
vitrification and/or defenestration.
What I did say is that people can't talk to be about DRAFT ONE of each,
after Saturday -- because that's when I expire DRAFT ONE, and go off and
feverishly try producing draft two. I very much hope to have draft two out
by mid September, in time for you to read. Once they're out, people can
talk to me those.
I call draft two "final" only in that those will be the last DRAFTS. After
that, I submit them for inclusion in the Perl dist, and they're not drafts
anymore, they're... "editions"? "releases"?
In any case, having them in the Perl dist doesn't etch them in stone,
however. I've no doubt that there will be points that I will need to
clarify or revise, in these documents, for a very long time.
Lest anyone feel pressed for time, I hereby formally welcome comments on
these documents, from anyone, at any time between now and the heat death of
the Universe -- with the simple sanity-preserving precedural provisos that
the comments must be about the current version, and that I may occasionally
and briefly close the comments period while am off I redacting a new
version in response to previous comments.
(Yes, procedural sanity preservation on p5p!)
Of course, if there is something vital that occurs to people between
Satuday and when I emit draft 2, people may email me, the same way that the
rule "don't call Sean in the middle of the night, or he'll be annoyed and
will answer with 'WHAT?' instead of 'Hello'!" can be overridden in cases
of, say, "Sean left his wallet here. And it's on fire! And hissing!
Maybe I should call him!"
>There are definitely some things in the drafts that I think are wrong.
>For example, just today I noticed a prohibition against turning -- into a
>real dash; this would reverse a promise that's been made by pod2man since
>Tom Christiansen wrote it:
No, there is no probition to that effect at all. What I said was this
(with hopefully helpfully contrastive allcapsing):
Pod PARSERS SHOULD NOT, BY DEFAULT, try to coerce apostrophe (') and
quote (") into smart quotes (little 9's, 66's, 99's, etc), nor try to
turn backtick (`) into anything else but a single backtick character
(distinct from an openquote character!), nor "--" into anything but
two minus signs. They I<must never> do any of those things to text
in CE<lt>...> sequences, and never I<ever> to text in verbatim
paragraphs.
What you apparently thought I said, was this:
Pod FORMATTERS MUST NEVER try to...
Pod::Man can continue to intelligently turn "--" into E<emdash> as it sees
fit, because it's not a parser, it's a formatter.
--
Sean M. Burke [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.spinn.net/~sburke/
