From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2009-08-12T22:15:25+09:00
Subject: Re: 1.9 String and M17N documentation

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 5:02 AM, Brian Candler<b.candler@pobox.com> wrote:

> In My Opinion (which may not be shared by anyone else), ruby 1.9's
> String implementation is anything but robust. It's over-complicated,
> under-specified, buggy as hell, and badly gets in the way when you want
> to work with binary data or write programs which don't crash when given
> unexpected input.

I'm not sure what binary data you've been having such great problems
with.  Prawn deals with a lot of binary data, and yes, we needed to
make sure that it was being loaded as such and not accidentally
treated as encoded bytes, but I really didn't find this to be a major
undertaking.  I guess this is because we didn't need to port over
existing 1.8 code and wrote our implementation with 1.9 in mind, but
maybe I'm missing some big problem that we didn't hit in our use case.

On a personal note, I wish you'd cut out the vitriol, because you're
acting like a jerk.   You have learned a lot about the M17n system and
produced valuable resources in the process, and have helped uncovered
dark corners and bugs, and for that, the community can be appreciated
for the efforts.   But if you manage to make everyone feel miserable
in the process with your abrasive attitude, I don't think that's going
to do anything for anyone.

You've made your feelings about the design decisions very clear.  Now
can you maybe stick to the technical details so that these discussions
don't become nasty unnecessarily?

-greg