[Catalyst] ANNOUNCE: Catalyst::Devel 1.07 and Catalyst::Manual 5.7012 released to CPAN

[Kieren Diment]

On 4 Jun 2008, at 00:30, Bill Moseley wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 08:37:38PM +1000, Kieren Diment wrote:
>>
>> Translation:  pod and YAML are both whitespace dependent in subtly
>> different ways that interact in a manner which  is confusing for new
>> users.
>
> Yes, whitespace issues in YAML can be frustrating.  Can you give an
> example of a case where POD and YAML were causing new users confusion?
>
>

Well, accessability issues aside, when you put yaml in pod, you pad  
each line with spaces in order to provide a verbatim section in the  
pod.  Firstly different people use different levels of spacing, so  
some people pad with 1 space, some pad with more.  I think most pod  
translators pad these verbatim sections with spaces as well, and I  
think that the padding used is variable, and dependent on what  
translator was used to render the pod.  So this is something that a  
new user has to think about which they shouldn't have to do.  And if  
they fail to remove the padding properly, then the yaml is invalid,  
and something extra that they have to think about, especially because  
yaml error messages are often arcane, and not easily picked up on the  
catalyst debug screen.

These problems then add more cognitive overhead to the configuration  
of the user's  application.  Better just to use a config file format  
that sidesteps these issues completely.

Because FormFU seems to only support YAML out of the box we had to  
work around this issue with the AdvancedCrud::FormFu tutorial, and  
you'll see a satisfactory but hacky solution at the bottom of this  
tutorial.

Of course, you're still allowed to use any config format supported by  
ConfigLoader to configure your catalyst app.