On Fri, Feb 4, 2022 at 2:37 PM Alexander Hartmaier
<alex.hartmaier@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 3, 2022 at 11:00 PM Neil Bowers <neilb@neilb.org> wrote:
>>
>> We discussed perldelta naming at the last PSC meeting, and agreed that there’s too much benefit to having the file called perldelta.pod in blead, specifically so people can be told "if you make a change of note, update perldelta.pod", rather than having to put [version].[revision] in there.
>>
>> And it’s somewhat handy that I can type `perldoc perldelta` to find the changes in my locally installed version of Perl.
>>
>> Dan wrote:
>>
>> One thing that could be changed without breaking this is to have the perldelta copied to its new version during the RMG distribution process, rather than on installation - this would fix its availability on metacpan, as discussed in https://github.com/metacpan/metacpan-web/issues/2587 and related issues.
>>
>> The key word here presumably being *copied*? So when 5.35.9 is released, it would have both perldelta.pod and perldelta5359delta.pod, with identical contents, and the RMG would still have the post-release action to create a new perldelta.pod in blead.
>>
>> This feels like a good step.
>>
>> Neil
>>
>
> Thanks for discussing it!
>
> I understand the advantages for the Perl developers but they are at the expense of the users.
> Can a build step be used to have both?
> As a user I don't care about development version changes, just those that went into a stable release (is that the correct wording for the even numbered releases?).
I have yet to hear of any demonstrated harm to users, and in Neil's
message he mentions that copying the current perldelta to a
version-specific copy at release time "feels like a good step."
Doesn't that give everybody what they want? It will require someone
making changes to the release process.
> For example you currently can't link to the perldelta of the newest stable release on metacpan because it isn't called perldelta$versionnumber at that time.
I must be missing something here. If you want to link to a specific
version, why not just link to a specific version like you would with
any other file in the distribution:
https://metacpan.org/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.32.0/view/pod/perldelta.pod https://metacpan.org/release/XSAWYERX/perl-5.34.0/view/pod/perldelta.pod ?
If someone does change the release process to copy the current file to
a version-specific clone, then you will also be able to link to that.
> I'm sure there are reasons for not only having a single perldelta where all versions are documented?!
I think the only reason for not having it is that no one has felt it
was necessary. We're basically using the file system as an index
since the relevant POD files have the version number embedded in them
for prior releases so it's pretty obvious where to find changes for a
particular version. Building an index that links to all of them could
certainly be done if someone wanted to do it, or, as I suggested
earlier, links could be added to perlhist entries.