GSoC Status Report

Hello all,

My name is Marc Green and I am working on the 'Standardization of Core
Documentation Parsing Tools' GSoC project. The proposal is available for
reading at https://gist.github.com/941354. If you don't want to read the
whole thing, or even follow the link, the description of the project is as
follows: I am going to deprecate Pod::Parser by replacing all uses of it
within perl's core with Pod::Simple.

Although the coding period does not officially start until May 23rd, my
mentors (hey rjbs and theory) and I decided that the best way to participate
in the community bonding/setting up period is to start coding. I have been
working for about 2.5 weeks so far, and decided I have made enough progress
to elicit a status report, so here we are.

In summary, this is what I have done so far:
- converted the first (and easiest) module, Module::Build::PodParser, from
using Pod::Parser (https://github.com/marcgreen/module-build)
- started converting Pod::Html to use Pod::Simple instead of the home grown
parser
- - I have implemented a --backlink flag in Pod::Simple as a first step (
https://github.com/marcgreen/pod-simple)

What I plan to do over the next week(s):
- continue converting Pod::Html to use Pod::Simple (I believe this will be
the most time consuming module to convert)
- - I will need to write a subclass of Pod::Simple::Xhtml in order to
implement the features needed for Pod::Html
- - my mentors and I have decided to remove the current cache feature of
Pod::Html in order to simplify the conversion

Also, if you *really* want to know what is going on, the irc logs from the
meetings I have with my mentors are available at
https://github.com/rjbs/TPF-GSoC-Pod. There is also a todo list there I made
for myself, but it probably won't shed any light on the situation for anyone
who is not me.

Thanks for reading,
Marc