On Tue, 2018-05-29 at 15:20 +1000, Ron Savage wrote: > On 29/05/18 13:49, Karl Williamson wrote: > > The question is what to do? > > > > 1) We could leave things as they always have been, to let sleeping > > dogs > > lie. It's worked for so long that we're not seriously going to > > stop > > accepting these. > This pretends things have not changed when in fact they have, so not > my preference. > > > > > 2) Raise the warnings, either on both cases or just the deprecated > Raise warnings on deprecated structures, so uses can fix problems, is > my choice here.
I agree that this *sounds* like the sensible thing to do, but the reality is that it will causes tests to fail. The Test::Pod module is used extensively throughout CPAN and it's function is to take any errors or warnings in the file under test and turn them into test failures. Distributions which passed their tests when uploaded will suddenly start to fail tests on install. A few years back I added a warning about non-ASCII characters in POD without an =encoding declaration - the fallout continues to this day. I'm still smarting from being accused of "breaking half of CPAN" :-) I'm not saying don't chose this option, but it's likely some pain will ensue. A number of people wisely pointed out that Test::Pod should only be used in author tests and should not be run at install time. Who knows, perhaps enough people have since taken that advice and it won't be a problem. If not, regularly breaking things in this way is really the only way to get that message out. Perhaps a doc patch to POD::Test might help. > > 3) Don't raise warnings, but change Pod::Checker to do so, under > > the > > theory that you won't be using that unless you want to know the > > iffy > > things. Maybe make the deprecated come out always, and the > > tolerated > > only for level 2 warnings. > This imposes a burden on users. Tasks: (a) Change to Pod::Checker, > to > find problems; (b) Fix problems. Not my preference since it's > simpler > for the end user to find the same problems under (2). I tend to agree. If non-compliant POD is a problem then I'm not sure that option 3 is going to solve that problem. Regards Grant
