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Postings from December 2017
On Sat, Dec 30, 2017 at 3:36 PM, Ãvar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Sat, Dec 30 2017, Father Chrysostomos jotted: > > > Avar wrote: > >> I think in the future it makes sense to hold > >> ourselves to reviewing these features once they've been unchanged in say > >> 2 or 3 releases, and for the policy to say that experimental features > >> unchanged in 3 development cycles must either be promoted to > >> non-experimental, removed entirely, or have their semantics changed in > >> major ways. > > > > I don't think it makes sense. If a feature is significantly flawed > > (and experimental) due to lack of tuits (e.g., refaliasing), do > > we have to make meaningless design changes to it to avoid having > > it yanked? > > Not meaningless design changes, but to have some sort of schedule > (preferably enforced by code, i.e. as soon as we begun 5.25 we start to > warn/die) giving these experimental features an explicit expiry date. > > The way perlpolicy is worded now, we could introduce an "experimental" > feature and not change its semantics for 20 years, and still call it > "experimental". That's absurd. > > Consider the situation we're now in. We're about to release 5.28 and > we've chickened out on changing a supposedly "experimental" feature > mainly because it breaks stuff on CPAN. > > This is the use it or lose it moment, either we change the semantics, or > we have to recognize that the "experimental" status perlpolicy talks > about doesn't exist at all, we're back to the pre-Jesse days of "change > perl and if people use it the semantics stay forever". > > I'm not saying we have to take Zefram's patches as-is, but we should at > least change to something so that unless you specify: > > no about::to::deprecate "smartmatch"; > > We'll just die when we see given/when, to prepare people for "yes we're > *really* about to change this and we mean it". > As mentioned before, this is a unique situation. A lot of the code using smartmatch, broken by these changes, was written on perls where it is not experimental. I do not think this is a good example of the community adopting an experimental feature to base policy changes on. However if you want to talk about the signatures feature that's a different story... -DanThread Previous | Thread Next