2008-09-14: podlators 2.1.3
The primary change in this version is some sorting-out of the Unicode
support. Thank you very much to H. Merijn Brand and Juerd Waalboer for
their patient explanations of the Perl core test suite failures and how
Perl Unicode support is supposed to work.
As of this version, Unicode support in pod2man and Pod::Man will not work
properly unless the POD input properly declares =encoding utf-8.
This is required, and always has been required, by the POD specification.
Without this setting, some Unicode settings of Perl will result in doubled
encoding. Proper encoding is now tested in the test suite.
This version also adds a --stderr option to pod2man and pod2text and a
corresponding setting to Pod::Text and Pod::Man which sends errors in the
POD to stderr instead of to a POD ERRORS section in the generated file.
This may be preferrable, since the POD errors aren't of interest to the
end-user and errors may be more visible during the build.
There are some additional fixes to the documentation and the spelling
checks, thanks primarily to Niko Tyni.
You can get the latest version from the podlators distribution page.
2008-09-14: spin 1.71
I managed to trigger the spin Perl warnings about undefined variables
caused by a missing argument to a command today, and took a moment to fix
it. Missing arguments are now set to the empty string rather than an
undefined value, and \size now produces a good error message about an
empty file argument. There are probably other commands that will need a
similar fix, but I'll get those as they show up.
You can get the current version of spin from my web tools distribution page.
2008-09-21: spin 1.73
I removed a directory from my web site this afternoon, ran into spin's
lack of support for deleting removed directories, and took a moment to fix
that. It requires switching from find to finddepth, and I'm not sure what
version of File::Find introduced that interface, so it may require a newer
version of Perl than 5.005 now. I didn't go back and check.
I also mentioned that dependency handling doesn't work ideally with
\sitemap and \include, added better documentation around \id and the
Subversion Id expansion, and made a few other documentation improvements.
You can get the latest version from my web
tools distribution page.
2008-09-21: Usenet standards
While reorganizing and improving bits of my web site, I started poking at
my Usenet article format and NNTP pages. The first step was the addition of \size to spin, but I
also wanted to replace the Apache fancy-indexing directory listings of
drafts with something more informative.
I've now updated both pages to have real indexes of drafts that include
links to the IETF pages and abstracts for the documents, as well as a few
other comments. In the process, I found a bunch of other Internet-Drafts,
particularly historical versions, that I didn't have on hand and fleshed
those out.
All of this really is just another (and sometimes less useful)
presentation of information that's already available from the
IETF, so I'm not sure how useful it
is, but if I'm going to keep it around I may as well do a good job of it.
While I was at it, I also updated the link to the
Moderator's Handbook in
the Pitfalls of Moderation FAQ since
landfield.com appears to be down for the count. Since I was editing it
anyway, I cleaned out some of the unnecessary emphasis and improved the
writing style minorly.
2008-09-21: podlators 2.1.4
This is entirely test suite fixes. The primary goal of the release is to
skip all the UTF-8 tests on versions of Perl earlier than 5.8, since
Pod::Simple refuses to cope with UTF-8 encodings on earlier versions of
Perl and fails all the tests. Since I'm getting regular error reports
about that, it will be nice to stop it.
The other fix is to support aspell for spelling checks, since someone (I
forget who) sent me the right aspell command to simulate ispell
-l. This is useful since ispell on Red Hat is actually a wrapper around
aspell that, for extra credit, doesn't recognize the same flags in the
same way and hence spews to standard error.
I hope that this spelling check is going to be more useful than harmful.
aspell has a slightly different dictionary, of course, so required more
stopwords. I hope I'm not just generating spurious errors for people on
make check for things that don't matter. But the idea of automatically
checking spelling with every release is so neat....
Anyway, you can get the current release from the
podlators distribution page, and from
CPAN in a few of course.
2008-09-23: House with a view
I don't quite have the energy to write a review this evening, so have
another beach photograph.
I'm looking forward to vacation this year, since I know so much more about
photography. I'm skipping past a lot of pictures from last year that are
okay, but which could have been so much better and which I can do such a
better job of now.
Three hours of meetings (which became two and a half, but that doesn't
always help) plus an hour and a half of volleyball devoured the day, so I
didn't get much else done. I'm trying to help debug a problem with the
new GPS receiver PCI board for our new campus stratum one time server,
which will also be absorbing several other services from one of our very
few remaining sarge systems, and work continues on our new virtualization
project. I have very little time for anything else at the moment, but I
did get new OpenAFS packages uploaded for lenny that fix the worst of the
current bugs and add 2.6.27 kernel support.
Tomorrow, I get to take the car into the shop to have them figure out why
the battery isn't holding a charge. It's very nice, convenient, and
useful to have a working car. It's a great deal of work (and expense) to
have a car that doesn't work, at least if you want to change that state.
If Zipcar parked one of their cars just a little closer, it would be an
easy decision to give up having a car completely, given that I drive at
most a few hundred miles a year. (Although I do like my car. When it's
working.)
2008-09-26: Things learned from debate
Things you learn from a US Presidential debate: Apparently the solution
to the Iranian crisis is to replace the United Nations with the
Extraordinary League of Democracies.
They need to have a really cool plane. And a secret headquarters.
2008-09-28: bundle 2.30
I'm going through the Debian packages of my scripts and redoing them using
Git as part of rebuilding my personal archive using reprepro, and in the
process I took another look at bundle. This is a remarkably stable
script — we're not using it as much in production any more,
but I'm still using it for all my personal systems — which
means that it doesn't get as much love on coding style.
This is entirely a coding style change, changing all global variables to
all caps and adding my new -v handling code to print out more
information and to use standard output. It also changes the default
interpreter path to /usr/bin/perl to match all my other scripts.
You can get the latest version from the bundle distribution page.
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