"Conrad Schneiker" <schneik / us.ibm.com> writes:

> > We ran out of space to put everything, so we discussed with Matz what
> > the most used packages were and documented those.
> 
> Hmm. I've got 10 blank pages in the back of my book. :-)

That's where we printed the meaning of life, but they made us take it
out.

Actually, our original page budget was 350, so 600 was definitely
pushing it.

> Why not? IMHO, with the explanations about lack of space and what it is 
> you are listing, that would be OK as a minimally sufficient but still very 
> nice and (new-)user-friendly set of pointers.

Actually, if we set of things in the /lib and /ext directories can be
agreed, then I agree, we should have a page with a summary list. It'll 
have to wait for the second edition unless I can find a blank page
somewhere in the body where it could fit: I can't change the overall
pagination during reprints.

However, /lib needs a bit of a tidy. For example, Matz has said he
doesn't like English.rb, and there's cgi-lib vs. cgi, monitor
vs. mutex vs. sync vs. thwait, and telnet and ftplib are
obsolete. Some things in /lib are essential (such as debug, mutex and
the like) and others are really just sample programs (eregex.rb, for
example).

But, I agree a list in the book would be nice.

Dave