I don't much like POD. Sure, its ok for a quick bit of usage doc on a small script, or even for a little module with just a few methods. But for serious projects, esp. to be delivered to paying customers, POD is pretty weak.

The reason ? Just take a random walk around CPAN and see how many different styles of docs you can find. My guess is it will be nearly equal to the number of modules you look at.

Then there are the myriad variations of POD formatter behavior. A quick survey leads me to believe most aren't valid (just write some POD inside a string literal or heredoc, and see what your favorite formatter does).

My pet peeve is the lame link tag that can't seem to deal with matching text up with a URL. WTF ? HTML has been doing that for over a decade!

POD's weakness is its simplicity. Its a formatting discipline, not a content discipline. The result is random adherence to somewhat arbitrary de jure standards.

About 18 months ago I was in a bit of a quandry as to how to provide usable docs to a paying customer for a fairly large project with lots of packages, and complex concurrency issues. Part of that exersize led to some upgrades for UML::Sequence. Another part was development of a little formatter for a javadoc-ish embedded docs solution. The customer was very pleased with the resulting docs.

Thanks to PPI and Pod;:ProjectDocs, plus a few helper modules, I've managed to get the formatter into CPANable shape, in the form of Pod::Classdoc. The resulting toolset includes

Here's an example of the result. It was generated using just the following command: 

mkprojdocs -f -o ./classdocs -t "Pod::Classdoc" -d "Generate merged pr
+oject documentation" -D Pod-Classdoc-1.01.tar.gz

[download]
(Well, yes, I did have to write the embedded classdocs... but thats sortof the point)

So if you're looking for a better content discpline for those large Perl projects, and POD just ain't cuttin' it, Pod::Classdoc might fit the bill.

Perl Contrarian & SQL fanboy

In reply to Perl for Perl's Sake: Yet Another Perl Doc Tool by renodino

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