I have just submitted a second version to the RFC-meister. I have taken on
board pretty nearly all of Leon's suggestions and - I hope - refuted Nate
Wiger's criticisms.
After having given this some considerable amount of thought, I think that
it's actually not as stupid an idea as I originally though. Damnit, this
was *meant* to be a joke, not a serious contribution!
It's a pity that there's no area for submitting RFCs about the perl
community instead of just the perl language. If there was, I would have
submitted something like this:
TITLE
Multi-versioned books considered annoying
ABSTRACT
It is difficult for compulsive buyers of perl books to tell where the
differences are between editions of the same title. This RFC proposes
an easy way to fix this.
DESCRIPTION
Taking an example at random, it is hard for readers to immediately tell
what is new and/or changed (especially what is changed) between the second
and third Camel books. As the publishers do not provide the book in
electronic format, use of diff(1) is prohibitively time-consuming, as it
involves first scanning both books and proof-reading them for OCR errors.
And anyway, diff is too verbose. We are not interested in the correction
of spolling mistooks, changes in line length etc between editions.
Doing a visual diff is likewise time-consuming. It is easy to tell which
chapters have been added or removed - or shuffled around, but it is hard
to tell if the contents of a chapter have changed enough to warrant a
closer look.
Therefore, I propose that authors should be encouraged to list, in an
appendix, the changes which they consider to be important.
--
David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
Q. Why do anarchists drink herbal tea?
A. Because all proper tea is theft.
