Preamble:
Making pod2html use Pod::Simple::HTMLLegacy /might/ actually be
simpler than patching Pod::HTML or Pod::Parser or whatever.
About my bungling:
On 07/20/2010 01:00 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote:
I would like to see pod2html (as a Pod::Html-based thing) be replaced with
Pod::Simple, which should fix this. [...]
Oh crap! I thought I fixed this years ago! (But, I now see, didn't!)
Namely, I thought I had replaced the innards of pod2man and pod2html
with something that used Pod::Simple, since Pod::Simple is The Way,
and that all other parsing would be a difficult and confusing
duplication of already difficult and confusing effort, etc.
That was The Plan, at least.
(And if you think I got The Plan from Battlestar Galactica then you
are very wrong. Because this was all before the Cylons! Sort of. No
sPoILeRz!!!)
Then I get sick, years pass as I get kinda better, I come back, and
find that I forgot some stuff, see above. Namely, I had pod2man and
pod2html on hand, to wrangulate as would be best, but 1: I didn't
follow through, and 2: I failed to flag this and to tell folks hey,
this is the part where someone should follow through, and sooner
rather than later, so I can probably still remember the details...
which I no longer remember a whit of.
Now we hear an epic of... ME! And pod.
0) As I was waiting for my tires to get replaced in a... car...
place... in Albuquerque, I started the guts of Pod::Simple, to work in
the spirit of my years-before rebuild of HTML::TreeBuilder, namely to
be as tolerant and understanding of errors as possible.
And over the following weeks, I wrote perlpodspec as I was cranking
out the innards of Pod::Simple, so I could get my head together and
also run my choices in the module's logic past people, in English
instead of as just a block of nasty jumbly-code with # ?? here and
there. (That was about a decade ago, when I had a car, and tires, and
an Albuquerque.)
1) A while into that, I started writing Pod/Simple/HTMLLegacy.pm with
the Plan that it would be a drop-in for something that a tiny
pod2html file would invoke (just as the current perldoc file is a
little file simply invoking a sub in Pod::Perldoc).
3) ...and that I very stupidly said in HTMLLegacy.pm that an
invocation as pod2html would be deprecated-- but: no, NO, it should
just do as it's told, with no deprecation for any reason that I can
now imagine. Call it a passing thought that wouldn't have survived a
minute's longer of coding.
4) ...and I didn't write proper (any) pod documentation for
HTMLLegacy.pm, in fact I left the code+docs like 80% done, or something...
5) ...while I staggered digressedly away to do something else...
probably that was when I went and spent a month making
Pod::Simple::Man's output nearly byte-for-byte identical to the output
of Pod::Man. What a crisp and delightful time that was.
6) But I similarly-and-worse forgot to produce a /drop-in/ pod2man
replacement. It sure looks like perldoc -o nroff should do the same
job, just not with the same switches and thus not a drop-in. Dunno,
I encourage everyone to do what they can, making sense of it all.
7) ...and then I did some other stuff I've forgotten...
8) Then I got sick. Hard neuro stuff, and it took ages to work out
proper drug combination fixes. Luckily, my boyfriend's work insurance
covered sort-of-most of the cost of this, because it gave domestic
partnership benefits (which they have since yanked, with Phelpsian glee).
A side effect of it all is that I permanently have a memory like Swiss
cheese in a stoner's fridge. (If you have ever wondered about my
well-known bitterness toward Switzerland and marijuana, all is now
laid bare.)
9) ...what were we talking about just now?... Fondue?
10) Then there was a long blur of years where I managed to do a good
amount of in-house programming but not managing anything CPANnish
because that felt Just All Too Much... (But I did re-re-rediscover
that Perl really is indeed wonderful at the task of one-off Data
Munging, as Dave Cross's underappreciated book titularly calls it.)
11) and somewhere I passed off my Pod::* modules to some very kind and
understanding people who I can't thank enough.
12) Twelve. I think these numbers are in order.
13) Over the years, I've vaguely had the occasional message thwack
(Lhttp://interglacial.com/~sburke/pub/sound/thwack.wav) into my
pod-people mail folder, and I really do apologize that I don't
reliably (at /all/ reliably) read and respond, ideally with a quick
insightful reply possibly involving code that illustrates and/or fixes
something. (Or: hummus.)
So... let's survey the quel dommage...
I failed to provide pod2html and pod2man drop-ins.
I WOULD crank one of each out right now (especially since the current
output of either can occasionally be the sort of thing to make ya want
to reconvene the Nuremberg Tribunal), but:
Firstly, my brain just doesn't work
