Mailing List Archive

PSC minutes from July 16
# PSC #029 2021-07-16

Present: Neil, Paul, Rik (secretary)

We reviewed our items from last week. We closed a few issues, and Paul realized he was no longer waiting on a new PPPort release, because one happened!

In other news of releases we'd been waiting on, one was Text-Tabs+Wrap, which had a developer release by the time of our call and has now had a standard release. This is one more step toward all the code in core passing with strict enabled.

Neil reminded us that he'd be doing the next dev release of Perl, v5.35.2, and that he hadn't done one before. We gave some tips.

We went through our private issue tracker and talked just a bit about the perennial question of putting built-ins in namespaces. It was really brief, though.

By far, the great majority of our time was spent reviewing The Big List of Quirks that Neil compiled by calling for input from an ever-growing group of Perl users. This document has grown to *thirty pages, *so it's going to take more than one meeting to review. The most common form of back-and-forth was Neil saying "…and this can confuse people" followed by me saying "not if they've closely read the seven relevant pieces of documentation!" and then getting a look.

So far, my personal guess is that we'll end up dividing things into roughly these categories, give or take:
* this is not a problem, the reporter just doesn't like it
* this is weird but unavoidable; maybe improve docs
* this is weird and could be fixed, but the cost/benefit is too low
* this is weird and could be fixed and we should discuss it
* this is just a bug and we could fix it

Next week, we agreed to have our call one day earlier than usual. I cannot say whether this will have any effect on the promptness of subsequent minutes. :-)

--
rjbs