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Re: perlbug UX
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From:
Zefram via perl5-porters
Date:
March 2, 2023 08:26
Subject:
Re: perlbug UX
Message ID:
ZABdkEP45xcRFg4k@fysh.org
Tomasz Konojacki wrote:
>I don't how to put this politely, but I'm unironically fascinated how
>out of touch you are. That markup language is called Markdown. It isn't
>specific to GitHub, it's *extremely* common.
I've encountered markup languages of that kind before. I'm not a fan of
them; they're usually poorly specified and never follow the principles
of good language design that we've establised over the last few decades.
The Perl world already has a better language for that kind of markup,
POD. But that's beside the point. The point is that perlbug didn't say
whether the message that it helps compose is a context in which markup
will be interpreted. It's not part of GitHub, so the expectations
there about Markdown don't apply. It's more like an email context,
and email generally isn't written in any lightweight markup language
(even yours is type text/plain). But it's a specialised kind of email,
the point of perlbug is to formulate its own specialised kind of message.
perlbug provides its own kind of context, and if there's going to be
any kind of markup in play then it needs to establish the expectations
for that context.
The attitude that you're displaying (by which I don't mean any adverse
judgement on your character) is one I've seen before, with older
technologies. I've seen how it plays out. You're implying that we
should be expecting pretty much all text to be written in Markdown.
A decade ago the equivalent was the expectation that all text is in
UTF-8. What did that lead to? A swath of general-purpose programming
environments losing their 8-bit cleanliness, and new ones never being
8-bit clean to start with. What's the equivalent fallout when assumptions
that all the world is Markdown gets baked into code? Probably manglement
of text resembling how email used to behave in the 1980s.
>Anyway, my personal opinion is that perlbug serves no useful purpose. We
>should change it so it just outputs the URL to our issue tracker and
>nothing else.
You need to do at least a smidge more than that. Fundamentally, you
need to decide what to tell non GitHub users who want to report bugs.
Just pointing at the GitHub tracker makes clear your preference for that
route of bug reporting, but doesn't say what non GitHub users are to do.
Your advice to them can be "go away", it can be "email p5p". Currently
it's "use perlbug to send a specially-formatted email message to p5p".
Which of those are you advocating?
-zefram
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