Re: Pod::Simple "simplification"

On Dec 10, 2009, at 5:21 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote:

> I'd like to (a) document more of what I've learned and (b) fix the fixable
> problems that I've encountered.  Documenting things now is silly, because most
> of what I've learned is what to fix, not what to document.

+1. I just did the same thing with Template::Declare: asked a lot of questions, wrote a lot of documentation and tests, and fixed a lot of stuff, just so that it could be better and I'd have my mind firmly wrapped around it. Doing something like that for Pod::Simple is…brave.

> ACTUAL QUESTION:
> 
> Is there any strong feeling that Pod::Simple needs to have so many things done
> either apparently or clearly in the interest of speed?  I found a number of
> methods that I could barely track down because they're generated strangely,
> explicitly in the name of speed.  There's a good bit of code to allow debugging
> output to be optimized away, which leads to stupid method of using "DEBUG"
> which leads to stupid bugs.  And so on.

I never had a problem using constants for DEBUGging myself, but I agree that speed is not of paramount concern. But then, I don't run search.cpan.org, either, where speed is clearly important.

> I would like to refactor the code as I work so that methods are easier to find,
> use, and replace as needed.  Maybe I can fill in some of the "to do"
> documentation, once I understand what the hell is going on.

+1

> Is anyone going to be put off by these kinds of changes *in general*?  The
> first one I hope to make is to add $self->debug($level, $msg) to replace the
> use of "print" which is broken when there's a non-STDOUT handle select-ed.
> That's also a good taste of the kind of changes I think I'll end up wanting to
> make.

Not I. Changes/Improvements good.

Best,

David