Re: A Problem With GD

As others have pointed out to Uri, you are being very near sighted about this. A change in the documentation does not mean that the entire documentation would be thrown out and new documentation would be put in its place. On the O'Reilly site they post latest changes as they get them. The Perl documentation is available separately on CPAN. ActiveState will allow you to download just the docs as well. All of these places update their information as it becomes available.

Some of the things that change over time are spelling errors that are corrected, badly worded phrases, and punctuation corrections. None of these means that a new release of the documents needs to be done until the next Perl release. Yet, they are available to the general public. Further, there are probably many small changes that have to be made for every release.

So yes - it is true the changes will be about Perl. After all, the documentation is about Perl. But no - it is not true that you can only get current information by downloading the Perl release and re-installing it each and every time. Further, the most current documentation will be on-line long before it ever makes it into the final release version for someone to download.

Whether or not the changes are for new features not given in a particular release or just corrections and additions to the pre-existing documentation was never an issue. The fact is, with a peer-review system your central repository is where the most current version is located and, once those changes are approved, they tend to diseminate out to the various outlets (such as O'Reilly et al). But the last place to look for the most current documentation - would be a release. Because a release is a snapshot of what was going on at a particular point in time.

Therefore, my answer to your question of "why am I looking on-line for the documentation" holds true. I looked there first because that is where the most current documentation should be. Since I had never seen what you had said before in my current documentation (But YOU WERE RIGHT! It was there!) my assumption was that something new had been added in to the documentation and that this change would be on-line. (Which, after I'd found it in the Perl docs on my system I again looked on-line and found it easily. [I was not using the right key words to locate the information before.])

Abigail wrote:
Mark Manning (markem@xxxxxxxxxxx) wrote on MMMMDLXXXIX September MCMXCIII
in <URL:news:12294v6togb5c5c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
?? ?? ?? Paul Lalli wrote:
?? ?? > Mark Manning wrote:
?? > ?? >>Yes, but you are forgetting that people do not update their installation of
?? >>every time a single change is made to the documentation.
?? > ?? > ?? > You are forgetting that the documenation is a standard part of a Perl
?? > release. The documentation does not change or get updated without a
?? > new version of Perl being released.
?? ?? No. I am not forgetting that the documentation is a standard part of a Perl
?? release. But, the documentation is changed prior to the next release. ?? Otherwise, how would the changes be approved?

Yes, to reflect the changes in Perl. The "current documentation" (which
I doubt is available on-line other than as an rsync source) matches the
"current version" of Perl. Where the "current version" is whatever patch
was committed last.

The change in the documentation will be about the change in Perl.

A change which you will not have.



Abigail

.

Relevant Pages

  • ANNOUNCE - Muldis::DB v0.0.0 released, in p5+p6
    ... I am pleased to announce the release of Muldis::DB version 0.0.0 for Perl 5 on CPAN. ... If you want to read all the Muldis::DB documentation that exists now, I recommend doing so in this order: ... Muldis::DB implements a D language as defined by Hugh Darwen and Chris Date, and presents a superior interface for working with the relational model of data, contrasted with SQL. ...
    (perl.dbi.users)
  • Re: How to use select (select(2)) in Perl?
    ... }> global-assignment *across* a package does. ... Perhaps we could agree that the ONLY real change in the documentation ... } very thin wraper around that, that provides a Perlish interface. ... } be willing to bet that if perl hadn't had select in the first place, ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)
  • Re: Wait for background processes to complete
    ... especially the ones about the Perl Documentation being ... There is no further reference to a "double fork" (except in the ... There is a general problem with perl documentation: ... and what the child should do depend on what you want them to do. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)
  • perldoc -q date|time FAQ -- and -- Re: making same change to *lots* of files, *w
    ... whether the point 24 hours ago was in daylight savings time. ... How do I get a file's timestamp in perl? ... You use the utime() function documented in "utime" in perlfunc. ... Check the documentation for your specific version of Perl. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)
  • Re: regex to convert 1000000 -> 1,000,000 ?
    ... >> is a big chunk of that documentation and pretty hard to miss, ... the whole situation is like this: Perl is like a software ... If the newbie is an idiot, and uses grep not to search and then check the ... > have to first KNOW of perldoc. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.misc)