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Thu, 21 May 2009

POD includes

One of my CPAN distributions is CPAN-FindDependencies. It contains a module CPAN::FindDependencies, and a simple script that wraps around it so you can view dependencies easily from the command line. That script, naturally, has a man page. However, that manpage basically says "if you want to know what arguments this program takes, see the CPAN::FindDependencies docs". This is Bad from a usability point of view, good from a not-duplicating-stuff point of view, and good from a laziness point of view. Which means that it's Bad.

So, the solution.

=over

#include shared/parameters

=back

and some Magic that does the cpp-stylee substitution at make dist time. Note the 'dist' section in my call to WriteMakefile.

This is, of course, crying out to be made less horribly hacky, but it works for now, so I'm happy.

My original idea was to write some crazy shit that would do the #include at install-time, when the user was installing my code. But that has the disadvantage that tools like search.cpan wouldn't show it properly, as they simply look at the files in the distribution. So this does the #includes at the last moment just before I package up the code and upload to the PAUSE. You lovely people get the right documentation in all the right places, I only have to maintain it in one place so it stays in sync, and (in the interests of Laziness) I don't have to remember to run any extra scripts before releasing, make dist just Does The Right Thing.

Posted at 20:12 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | perl
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