Re: Text::Iconv 1.4, new Validator bundle?

* Martin Duerst wrote:
>I have never seen anybody on this list who suggested that
>releasing often is a bad idea. But whenever it came close
>to releasing, everybody seemed to me sceptical. The only
>way, in my experience, to release often is 'just do it'.

That wasn't me...

>Why not do the beta release before we have 'at least the quality
>of 0.6.7'?

Why would we do that? Drafts with known issues usually waste reviewer
resources (of which we do not have much) regardless of notes on known
issues and might generate noise (reports on known issues) which again
wastes time (developer and/or community time), so there would need to
be good reasons to do that.

>I was successfully able, in my checkout version, to get rid
>of the counting problems when indicating where on a line an
>error occurred. That's definitely a bug fix, and for some
>people (all those working outside ASCII), it may be a real
>feature.

There are other approaches to do that though, for example it would
be possible to create a copy of the relevant string and, iff Encode
is available, turn the UTF-8 flag on for that string only. Another
approach would be to turn the UTF-8 flag on for the Text::Iconv
result if Encode is available. This would have less disadvantages
(for the possible expense of additional complexity). But I do not
think we should do that either at this point.

>The actual disadvantage would be non-support for
>GB18030. The other things that you have mentioned will
>have to be checked very carefully eventually, but should
>be okay for most cases (and going through the code and
>replacing \s and friends in regular expressions with actual
>precise [] shouldn't be such a big issue).

Replacing \s and friends is certainly something that could be done
for 0.7.0 as it would not have any negative impact if done properly
(either \s means [ \t\r\n] and can be replaced by that or it would be
a bugfix). If you do that in HEAD please make sure you add proper
comments so someone can proof-read the code and work on tests for the
changes.

Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2004 13:57:15 UTC