Hi monks,

after almost two years from RFC, italian Perl users published (finally!) to CPAN a large part of translated core Perl pods (including perlfunc and perlfaq*) into the package POD2::IT where 'IT' is the language code. This has been (and currently still is) a very big work! :-)

See http://pod2it.sf.net for more details about the project.

Once the package has been installed, the translated documentation can be accessed with:

   %> perldoc POD2::IT::<podname>
[download]

However the -f and -q switches don't work no longer.

So, I made a simple patch to Pod/Perldoc.pm 3.14 in order to allow also the syntax:

   %> perldoc -L IT <podname>
   %> perldoc -L IT -f <function>
   %> perldoc -L IT -q <FAQregex>
[download]

You can apply the patch with:

   %> patch -p0 `perl -MPod::Perldoc -e 'print $INC{"Pod/Perldoc.pm"}'
+` < /path/to/Perldoc.pm-3.14-patch
[download]

The patch adds the -L switch that allows to define language code for desired language translation. If POD2::<code> package doesn't exists, the effect of the switch will be ignored.

Note that the patch is for version 3.14 of Pod::Perldoc (included into Perl 5.8.7). If you have a previous Perl distro (but >= 5.8.1) and you are impatient to apply the patch, please upgrade your Pod::Perldoc module to 3.14! ;-)

Since Pod/Perldoc.pm's search_perlfunc uses hard coded string 'Alphabetical Listing of Perl Functions' to skip introduction, in order to make it to work with other languages with the option -L, I used a simple plugin-like mechanism.

POD2::<code> language package must export search_perlfunc_re that returns a localized translation of the paragraph string above. This string will be used to skip perlfunc.pod intro. Again, if POD2::<code>->search_perlfunc_re fails (or doesn't exist), we'll come back to the default behavoiur. This mechanism allows to add additional POD2::* translations without need to patch Pod/Perldoc.pm every time.

What do you think?

Regards

- Enrico