Re: Localized PODs

On Thu, Jan 30, 2003 at 02:00:06AM +0800, Autrijus Tang ([email protected]) said something similar to:
> On Wed, Jan 29, 2003 at 11:42:33AM -0500, Kevin Meltzer wrote:
> > I like this idea. Of course, this means module authors will also have
> > to create and maintain multiple PODs :-) Should h2xs be patched to
> > create stub files for alternate languages/encodings.. something like:
> > 
> > h2xs -<your normal switches> -l zh_TW,Big5 Foo::Bar
> 
> That's a very good idea.

Good. So my Good Idea Quota for 2003 is met.
 
> > Which would create Foo/Bar.zh_TW.pod and Foo/Bar.Big5.pod?
> 
> mm, no, the idea is zh_TW is all that's needed.  Big5 is merely its
> encoding; it can be declared in POD like:
> 
> 	=for encoding big5
> 
> 	=head1 ...
> 	...
> 
> The patch enabling this is already sent to Sean Burke.
> 
> So since I happen to use zh_TW.UTF-8 as the locale, perldoc would
> DWIM and convert its data on the fly.

Gotcha.
 
> > This would at least encourage people to do this. I would, though, get
> > nervous that if I was seeing the Big5 POD, and it wasn't kept up to
> > date, I would be missing info contained in  the 'default' POD. 
> 
> That's certainly true.  However that should not forbid people to do
> this; anybody that waits the 'default' POD should either set their
> locale to 'en' (which is, by default, the official language of perl
> documentations), or use 'perldoc -L en' to explicitly request for it.

Makes sense. I'd hope there would be a way, though, to somehow know
that the big5 encoding wasn't updated, but en was. If for nothing else,
to alert an author during a 'make dist'... "Hey Pal! Update the X, Y
and Z POD encodings!" This may be a little more complicated, as
something would have to keep track. Maybe I will give this some
thought.

Cheers,
Kevin
> 
> /Autrijus/



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