Perl Steering Council meeting minutes June 25

PSC #026 2021-06-25

In attendance: Neil, Nicholas, and Rik

This was our last PSC call with this particular trio. Sad, but time marches ever onward! Rik was on
the hook for minutes this week, and was apparently so broken up about the change that he couldn't
manage to send them for a full calendar week.

RFCs

The RFC process is moving along with some ups and downs, but we feel like it's generally not a
disaster. It needs to continue moving, which means we need to figure out who the RFC editors are.
Our first pass answer is: the PSC, plus Nicholas.

We discussed "what are good criteria for future editors":

 * demonstrated ability to work with others

 * can do "editorial" task even on documents with which the editor disagrees

   * has shown reasonable judgement in "what is not a good idea" (as editors are allowed to
accept/reject)

   * need not be an expert (in design or implementation), but needs to know the limits of own
knowledge

 * doesn't attempt to argue with decided decisions (without significant new evidence)

 * understand perlishness such that they may not agree with every other porter, but their opinions
are defensible; that is, some other porter might say "I disagree" but not "what planet are you
from?"

Licensing Questions

Discussion of Ryū had us wondering, "Can we package Ryū, under the Boost license?" Rik has asked
TPF whether they can get us an opinion from counsel

Other Topics

 * C99 — what we want is a document Porting or pod that describes the parts of C we permit. This is
already present, ostensibly, in perlhack.pod under "Style". We'll also want to write up the process
by which we test things for sufficient portability, which is basically "build a test case that can
be smoked everywhere."

 * smoke-me branches: the state of these remains (as Jim put it) "complicated"; it would be nice to
feel we had someone who was championing an overall fix, but it's also not clear that this can be
done by somebody not already very familiar with the situation

 * we discussed some MRs (most notably changing how some core libraries use Exporter and dropping
the :win32 pseudo-layer); those two are now merged

 * we talked about the TPF "Shared Vision of Perl" survey and Neil was to send Andrew Solomon some
notes

 * I said I'd put together a list of "stuff PSC has said it wants to see happen and need to be
carried out", which I have done and will post about shortly.


-- 
rjbs