I'd say the inline version is more likely to be maintained because the "commute time" between the function and the associated documentation is much shorter. If things are on the same screen, even the lazy are inclined to keep things in sync. If it's at some obscure location in the file, things might drift apart.

BTW, here's a quick macro for 'vi' for skipping to the POD documentation in a file:      vi '+/^=pod' You could make this into an alias, such as 'vipod'. When it enters each file it runs the command to find the first line that begins with '=pod'. If you don't always use that tag, you can just search for the equals sign.