Michael Schwern wrote: !manifypods will generate man pages, even on VMS. Always has, always will. !Whether they will be generated by default is another question. They !currently are and were before I started mucking with things so I'm going to !leave it that way until there's an alternative.
The unfortunate thing is that man style roff is not helpful on VMS where an appropriate troff or nroff is typically not available. GNU groff might have been ported a while back but it is rare to find installed on VMS. The native RUNOFF command takes a slightly different input format and does not take a -man switch (er /MAN qualifier). !One could write up a vmshelpifypods target and then have that be run by !default rather than manifypods. Something similar would probably be useful !on Windows, too, which currently doesn't generate man pages by default. ! !It might then be wrapped up in a "docifypods" target which does the right !thing depending on what platform you're on (ie. chooses manifypods or !vmshelpifypods). ! !Implementing that is an exercise left to the reader. :) ! !Is there even a POD->VMS help module out there? Yes, but it goes by a name that tries to cloak it from Windows .hlp help compiler folks: http://search.cpan.org/src/PVHP/Pod2VMSHlp-1.02/ Note that CPAN indexers won't even index it under the VMS::* namespace because of the distribution name. The distribution includes a pod to VMS HLP converter and a pod to VMS RUNOFF converter (as well as a wrapper around LIBRARY to turn *.HLP files into a PERL.HLB help library). Caveat's: it does not use Pod::Parse, and it has not been tested against perl 5.8.0 and the Makefile.PL might have "" hash ref bugs in it. Peter Prymmer
