DocKnot 4.00

This release of my static site generator and software release management tool is finally at a point where I'm happy with some of the interface and think that piece may be stable for a while.

This release converts the package metadata format from JSON to YAML and cleans up a bunch of organizational errors I made when I designed it originally. That also means that the entire metadata is now in a single file, docs/docknot.yaml by convention, instead of needing a whole directory of files. (This comes with the minor drawback that one edits Markdown in text blocks in YAML, which has somewhat less editor support, but it works fine for me.)

There's a whole other blog post in how I've now tried many different markup formats, including TOML, and have decided YAML is the best one around if you want humans to be able to write it. (JSON or Protobuf is probably best if you only care about information exchange between software.) The short version is that YAML is way too large of a language and very painful to fully implement, but everything else fails to deal with one or more hard problems: nested structure, multi-line text, comments, or not requiring tedious quoting of everything. I'll be converting other software I maintain over to YAML with time.

This release also drops support for pointing the bug reporting address at the CPAN RT instance, since that's going away early in 2021. I will need to do new releases of all my Perl modules to point them at a different bug tracker.

Also in this release are some fixes for word wrapping and verbatim paragraph detection, some improved markup in generated README.md files, and other minor fixes.

As of this release, I'm now uploading the Debian packages to Debian proper as well. I'm not sure if anyone else will ever use this software, but since I'm going to be doing more automatic generation of files in source releases using it, it's properly part of the build toolchain for the software I maintain.

You can get the latest version from the DocKnot distribution page.