RFCs

Larry Wall will decide the changes to make for perl6 based on our suggestions. To make life easy for him, we should put some effort into our suggestions. RFCs are intended to be focus discussion on something that will be useful to Larry when he makes his decisions.

This format was last changed July 31, 2000.

Format

RFCs are written in POD. rfc-sample.pod is a sample. The important sections are: TITLE, VERSION, ABSTRACT, DESCRIPTION, IMPLEMENTATION, and REFERENCES. An optional section is STATUS.

A description of each section follows:

TITLE

One line, describing the proposed new feature or change.

VERSION

Metadata information: Maintainer, Date, Version, Mailing List, and Number.

• Maintainer. The name and email address of the person currently maintaining the RFC.
• Date. The date of the most recent release.
• Version. An integer version number. First version is 1.
• Mailing List. The mailing list on which discussion about this feature or change has taken place.
• Number. Unique RFC number, assigned by the librarian.

Here is an example:

  =head1 VERSION

    Maintainer: Nathan Torkington <gnat@frii.com>
    Date: 30 Jul 2000
    Version: 2
    Mailing List: perl6-internals
    Number: 1

ABSTRACT

One or two paragraph summary of the problem and proposed solutions, or feature and probable implementations.

DESCRIPTION

Detailed discussion of the problem or new feature.

IMPLEMENTATION

Discussion of the possible implementations. This doesn't have to be completely defined down to the char *, instead enough to show that it can be done.

REFERENCES

A list of pointers to other documentation relevant to the topic. This could be other RFCs, internet standards, existing Perl or operating-system documentation, books, and so on.

STATUS

Once an RFC is retired, the STATUS section is used to say why and how the RFC is dead.

Submitting

Mail the RFC to perl6-rfc@perl.org. It will be assigned a number if it doesn't already have one, then posted to the perl6-announce mailing list, as well as the list in the Mailing list metadata. They will also be archived at dev.perl.org.