Michael Scwhern wrote in reply to me: !> http://search.cpan.org/src/PVHP/Pod2VMSHlp-1.02/ ! !Perhaps you should change the name/wrap it in Pod::VMS::Hlp and pod2vmshlp !rather than Pod::Hlp to avoid confusion.
Perhaps, but the module Pod::Hlp does take Pod as input and produces VMS HLP as output. As it happens Microsoft is now abandoning their HLP format and urging developers nowadays to prepare program help in a special form of HTML that gets stuffed into help archives. Hence they've effectively abandoned their older hlp format and the confusion over formats may not linger much longer (as soon as folks migrate off win 95 and win NT onto win xp and win 2k). !> Note that CPAN indexers won't even index it under the VMS::* namespace !> because of the distribution name. ! !Should it? There's no VMS:: packages in it and with the exception of !pod2hlb, nothing really VMS specific about it. The format just happens to !be one used on VMS. Would be like having WWW::Pod::HTML instead of !Pod::HTML. True. But note that you did not know of the existence of the module when this thread started since it was that hard to find. I just wanted to make it easier for VMS perl folks to find it, but simultaneously not change the 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). ! !<Ignorance>Okay, whatever those are. ;)</Ignorance> FWIW: RUNOFF is a lot like roff except that the recognized macro sets are just different enough to be completely incompatible. Unfortunately Digital Standard Runoff, or DSR, is now so old and unsupported that the company that currently owns DEC only makes the documentation available for it on a special order basis. The other format is HLP. The man utility on VMS goes by the name "HELP" and does not read loose HLP files, rather it reads agglomerations of HLP files known as "Help libraries" whose file type or extension is HLB. The HLP files generated by pod2hlp can either be inserted into the system help library (which requires the moral equivalent of root access) or can be accessed as a separate help library - typically PERL.HLB. !> 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. ! !Well, if someone wants to fix it up and write a vmshelpifypods target I'll !hlp integrate it into MakeMaker. Hmmm - are you proposing adding either Pod::Hlp or Pod::Dsr to the perl distribution? Pod::Hlp does not use Pod::Parse owing in principle to a special =head$n re-ordering tweak used to generate HLP that is acceptable to the help librarian utility. Pod::Dsr does use Pod::Parse (ironically enough: the older output format converter uses the newer pod parsing technology). Peter Prymmer
