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demerphq (2831)

demerphq
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http://www.perlm ... l?node_id=108447
Perlmonk. Perl5 Regex Hacker. Telecoms Billing Specialist. Canadian living in Germany.

Journal of demerphq (2831)

Friday May 17, 2002
10:51 AM

Dumper distress

[ #5012 ]
Well. Every time I think my new Dumper is finished I discover some new bug. And often the bug aint mine, but rather a perl bug or a Data::Dumper bug.

Anyway, Ive come to the conclusion that (and 'a data structure' means any arbitrary data structure)

  • Its not possible to correctly dump a perl data structure with just one pass (which is what Data::Dumper tries to do).
  • Its not possible to dump a data structure correctly without using the tools in Array::RefElem
  • Its not possible to correctly dump a data structure using named vars only.

Also in the course of developing Data::BFDump I have discovered bugs in

  • Data::Dumper
  • Perl
  • B::Deparse
  • Test::More
  • List::Utils
  • Data::Dump

This accounts for some of the most well known and highly regarded authors in Perldom. And you know what? Of the bugs I have reported NONE of the authors has responded. Not so much of a peep. Even on the perl5porters list I got only one reply. Frankly the impression I get of that place is that if you cant write C/C++ code in your sleep then they wont even speak to you. A pretty disappointing reaction considering the kind of community that Ive come to love at places like Perlmonks.

Dont get me wrong I appeciate that the perl porters work hard and do a good job. I appreciate that many of the authors above are very busy people with lots on their plate. But a lousy email saying 'ACK' to a bug report really doesnt seem like that much to ask. Hell at least I went out of my way to find and inform them of the bug.

a slighty annoyed demerphq


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  • Could it merely be that many of them are busy? When did you notify them, and did you supply patches? What were some of the bugs?
  • I too was just thinking that it's very odd that of the people I've emailed about the Apache::MP3 localization project, many just didn't reply at all. My messages weren't to great big lists of people, and clearly weren't spam. But while I got lots of "OK, I'll do it!" email, I got almost nothing of the sort "Sorry, I can't" -- just silence instead. If people had said "Sorry, I can't", at least then I'd know to go look for another prospective translator for that language.
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