Fellow Monks,

I'm working on framework mobule that will be used by a small suite of commandline utilities, each with their own respective (perldoc) manual pages.

Rather than coding the POD for all of the commandline switches by hand (and keeping the switches up-to-date with what I accept with Getopt::Long, I'd really like to generate the POD dynamically, and have that apply to the manual page as output by perldoc. However—and here's the rub—when these utilities are released to CPAN, I want the generated POD to appear there as well (otherwise someone will have to download and install the utilities just to see their documentation, which would not be acceptable).

Here's what I already know:

• Getopt::Long and Pod::Usage are great together, but they only solve half the problem—the --help text (which could easily be generated dynamically).
• Actually generating the POD is trivial.
• Solving the problem for installed scripts (Makefile.PL) is relatively easy: just generate the POD during the build cycle.

The part I don't have a good solution for is getting the generated POD on CPAN/MetaCPAN. The best I've come up with is this: I could augment the utilities' release process to generate the POD so it's zipped up in the distribution tarball as if it was hand-coded, but (a) that effort would negate some of the savings of auto-generated POD, and (b) I don't want to impose that effort on others who may want to use my framework module for their own utilities. I'd like it to just work.

I'm hoping there's a simple solution, here—or something already inherent in how CPAN unpacks distributions that might help—but I haven't been able to find anything.

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