Re: apology. kind of.

On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 11:41:24AM -0500, Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi@iki.fi> wrote:
> If you want a public apology about calling you a vague whiner, here it is.
> I apologize.

Well, a privtae would have sufficed, but thanks a lot.

> Maybe you missed the smiley.

Completely. It was misplaced as well.

> But: I suggest you go back and read your original message "unicode
> support and perl " more carefully.  My opinion still is that you
> say too much "X is broken, X is simply wrong", without giving

Mind you, that e-mail is not the only e-mail, code-snippet, patch or
cpan-module related to the utf8-issue. Reducing me to that mail is not
fair.

> means: design specs, implementation details, code.  Code speaks
> so much louder than words.

Well, open your eyes?

> Well, what is your *concrete* suggestion?

That utf8-ness if scalarness must not be an internal feature, but a
documented one that people can rely on. Just what I wrote in the snippet
you quoted, actually. What could be more concrete???

> document patch would be concrete.

Come on. A sugegstion to remove INTERNAL marks is not worth a
patch. Coercing me into writing such a trivial patch for document that
changes hourly is harrasing me.

> Your comments amounts to "you guys suck".

I have no idea what you refer to (definitely not the above quote).

I neither implied that, nor did I write that.

> design, you could see opinions both for and against exposing this UTF-8
> detail.  Some people want to hide it because it may chance in the
> future, some people want the current guts exposed because that's what
> they need now.

And I want to expose it because it makes no sense to hide it - What's your
point here??

> of things you are trying to do and how do they break?  Again, your
> message can be condensed to "you guys suck".

That is your interpretation, and I think, quite far off what I actually
wrote.

That perl is quite broken with respect to utf8 is a fact, and that my
patches to fix part of the issues were ignored is no better.

If you interpret that as "you guys suck" then maybe you are right. Please
note, however, that I don't think that myself, and I have sid this
publicly quite a few times.

> representations."  Yes, I guess I was also personally offended by you
> calling the design specs I made "creating fancy modules", so my flip
> reply to you might have been because of that.

Maybe the language barrier hit here? A fancy module is, for me, a nice
module with high-level semantics. Something I would be fond of if I'd
written one.  Sorry if this means something else in english (I really like
to apologize, as I sometimes still stumble over english semantics).

> I think not being able to import/export legacy data is a serious
> hindrance before we can even begin to think using Unicode.

Well, and I think being able to import data but not being able to work
with it after that is a much larger hindrance. You can create and
import/export utf8 data quite nicely using just perl, and there is a
(un-fancy!) module on CPAN that allows us to manipulate scalars in the way
we want.

> We don't *need* any of these internal Unicode support things: we can
> do all using vec() and bit arithmetics if need be, or use external
> modules.  (Gisle's Unicode modules work fine without any internal
> Unicode support).

Sure we could. I made the exactly same point (albeit as a joke), namely
that we just do not need unicode support for regexes, after all, perl is
turing-complete.

So what is your point here?

> "and even writing patches didn't have the effect of getting this fixed."
> Quoting bug ids that are still not fixed would be another
> concrete way to help us get better.

Again, I wrote 5 times to this list, and 5 times nothing happened. Why
should I think writing a sixth time would help, given that the bug
database exists?

This is just harassment on the part of the people who do report bugs (or
even send fixes). I mean, you can bother people to send bug reports, send
fixes, correct fixes, ignore them once or twice, but, frankly, 5 times is
more than enough. Five times is the equivalent of "we just ignore you",
and this is how I feel.

Mind you, I am not the only one who complained. Another example: I found that
Storable doesn't support overloaded objects properly. I wrote a few patches,
harassed Raphael Manfredi to include them and then though, well, it might be
a perl bug.

I wrote twice to this list, asking for a clarification of wether that was
a Storable problem (i.e. xs has to care explicitly), a perl problem (perl
should take care of that) or a problem with the interpretation (copying
overloaded objects removes overloaded'ness).

It was ignored, probably because yet another discussion about the ??
operator was much more interesting.

I didn't whine then, and I don't whine now. But *please* don't harass me
when you obviously are not interested.

> Note: I'm actually supposed to be packing and my flight is leaving
> soon so please don't interpret my silence in any other way than as
> my absence.

O.k. Have a nice flight!

-- 
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      ---==---(_)__  __ ____  __       Marc Lehmann      +--
      --==---/ / _ \/ // /\ \/ /       pcg@opengroup.org |e|
      -=====/_/_//_/\_,_/ /_/\_\       XX11-RIPE         --+
    The choice of a GNU generation                       |
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• apology. kind of. by Jarkko Hietaniemi
• Re: apology. kind of. by Marc Lehmann
• Re: apology. kind of. by Simon Cozens
• Re: apology. kind of. by Marc Lehmann