Bug #77767 for Date-Manip: Remove depedency on YAML::Syck

Could you explain what the major advantage to doing this would be? I realize that YAML::Syck is not as well maintained, but it still works. The reason I'd prefer to use YAML::Syck is as follows: In YAML::Syck, $ref = Load($string) produces a data structure reference which contains exactly the same characters as $string had. So, if $string has UTF8 characters (which is the case with most languages), then the data structure produced also contains UTF8 characters. In YAML::XS, the data structures contain strings with perl encodings instead of UTF8 characters. This impacts me two ways: 1) In order to switch to YAML::XS, I have to audit/rewrite the code that deals with encodings to make sure they work. For example, simply changing YAML::Syck to YAML::XS causes many of the tests to fail due to this. 2) When I'm debugging (in a UTF8 terminal), if I print out a variable, I want to see the UTF8 characters, NOT the perl encoding, because it's simpler to read. Anyway, I've been playing with various ways to read <DATA> using YAML::XS and haven't found a way to do what I want, so I'm not sure that I want to switch to YAML::XS (even though I too prefer it as a module in most cases).

After further review, I have decided NOT to do this at this time. Although I will continue to evaluate this (it was on my TODO list before this request came in, and will remain there until I've resolved it to my satisfaction), I haven't found any major benefit to doing so, but the move does cause a few problems that I haven't yet found a nice workaround. I will continue to look into this and DO expect to migrate away from YAML::Syck at some time in the future, but probably not in the next 6 months.