# The following was supposedly scribed by
# khemir nadim
# on Friday 12 November 2004 05:26 am:
>lately I have added, to the application, �a self search feature that
> extract and display information embeded in pod.
There are already some modules designed to turn your pod into your
options. I opted not to go that route because pod lacks variables
(see the previous discussions under "not so plain documentation".)
The primary goal here was to handle user-configurable options with
reasonable defaults (so, of course the user should be able to see
those defaults in the help message (and of course I don't want to
duplicate information.))
>I believe it would be good to let the users of you module define
> what , how many types and how they want the help. So even my format
> is limiting.
I'm more inclined to leave that up to 'app -h | less' or 'perldoc
app'. But, I guess it depends on how many options you have and how
much help is included.
That said, I would like to find a way to integrate pod and help more
closely. However, I think at some point that the change has to
happen in perldoc (say, for instance, a new type of paragraph which
instructs perldoc to call the application with a certain flag
($paragraph = `app --podhelp` or something.)) Currently, I have a
section in my pods which elaborates on each option (there's a script
kicking around here somewhere which does formats help into pod, but I
don't like that approach because changes are a pain.)
>You could still have some default values and types for the user that
> is happy with what comes standard with the module.
I'm not sure I'm following you here. You want the help in multiple
formats or multiple levels of verbosity?
>Searching within the switch help is very usefull and should be
> supported.
So, --colorize is an option and 'pbs -hs colorize' shows only the help
for that option? Well, there is a usage() method in Getopt::Helpful
that gets called when you include the '+help' builtin and don't
define a main::usage(). I suppose it could check for leftovers in
@ARGV and change behavior based on that. Alternatively, there could
be a '+helpsearch' builtin which calls a different method entirely.
I'm more inclined to the first approach, so you would just do:
app -h switchname
--Eric
--
"It works better if you plug it in!"
--Sattinger's Law
