What do you do with typos in the documentation?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I ran "perldoc -f state" and it says in the last paragraph

"            "state" is available only if the "state" feature is enabl
+ed or
            if it is prefixed with "CORE::". The "state" feature is en
+abled
            automatically with a "use v5.10" (or higher) declaration i
+n the
            current scope.
"
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So I tried putting "use 5.10;" in my program and it said:

"Perl v5.100.0 required (did you mean v5.10.0?)--this is only v5.30.0,
+ stopped at bin/zclient line 5."
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so it looks liek the "state" documentation is telling me to use version 5 by 100!

The manpage for IO::Socket::INET has this in it. I didn't even try running it because it has the bareword of udp there which I'm pretty sure is illegal?

              $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(
                                      PeerPort  => 9999,
                                      PeerAddr  => inet_ntoa(INADDR_BR
+OADCAST),
                                      Proto     => udp,
                                      LocalAddr => 'localhost',
                                      Broadcast => 1 )
                                  or die "Can't bind : $@\n";
[download]

Comment on What do you do with typos in the documentation? Select or Download Code

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Re: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by Corion (Patriarch) on Jan 29, 2021 at 06:52 UTC
There is a difference between `use v5.10;` and `use 5.10` (without the vee). But in general, documentation bugs are the same as other bugs and should be reported through the bugtracker of the module, or for Perl, in the Perl bugtracker.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by GrandFather (Saint) on Jan 29, 2021 at 07:26 UTC
So in the documentation you saw "use v5.10" and chose to write "use 5.10". How precisely is that the documentation's fault? You then got an error message that asks: "did you mean v5.10.0?". How do you get from that to the "documentation is telling me to use version 5 by 100!"? Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond	[reply]
Re^2: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Jan 30, 2021 at 12:34 UTC
I presume he reached that conclusion because the error message begins "Perl v5.100.0 required".	[reply]
Re: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by hippo (Bishop) on Jan 29, 2021 at 09:55 UTC
The manpage for IO::Socket::INET has this in it. The IO::Socket::INET documentation also has this in it: `Currently maintained by the Perl Porters. Please report all bugs to <perlbug@perl.org>.` HTH. 🦛	[reply]
Re: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by tobyink (Canon) on Jan 29, 2021 at 17:46 UTC
For my distributions, I'd hope people would report doc bugs via the normal route for reporting issues, with a patch if possible. Generally speaking, I won't prioritize releasing a new version if the only change is a documentation fix; it'll just get rolled into whatever the next release is. Though if the mistake was serious enough, I might release a new version. Hire me at Toby Ink Ltd or Join my OnlyFans	[reply]
Re: What do you do with typos in the documentation? by stevieb (Canon) on Jan 29, 2021 at 13:31 UTC
"I didn't even try running it because it has the bareword of udp there which I'm pretty sure is illegal?" So you found two documentation "typos". One was a reading comprehension and instruction following issue on your part, the other was a lack of testing or investigation. The examples in the IO::Socket::INET documentation are not run under `strict`, so a bareword is completely legal and legitimate. Not only that, it appears as though you changed the excerpt, so it's not even an authentic example from their documentation. `blah(bareword); sub blah { my $word = shift; print "$word\n"; }` [download] Output: `bareword` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]


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