Re: Improve the speling for you moduels documention

Kudos. That is a really great idea for eliminating annoying typos in POD -- somehow, I always seem to catch a typo after I've released to CPAN (something to do with the really nice POD2HTML formatter they have, I guess). However... at the risk of reopening the Test::Pod/Test::Pod::Coverage flamewar, I'm also really glad that you caution in your docs about including a test like this in a distribution because of the the new dependency chain it adds:

Pod::Spell and Test::Spelling have to be installed (or downloaded and installed) or tests will fail (though smart use of eval "require ..." can address that)
The Pod::Spell version with stopwords needs to be the same as what you tested before release to not let something unexpected through (though it's not been updated since 2001, so that may not be much of an issue)
It relies upon an external spell checker program, which may or may not exist or exist by the hardcoded name provided

The way I see it, unless one is only writing for internal use or for someone with exactly the same system setup that one has, there are going to be a lot of spurious failures and frustrated downloaders.

If someone wants to check spelling with a .t file, I'd recommend not including it in the MANIFEST (and adding it to MANIFEST.SKIP) so it stays internal for one's own development purposes.

For your "todo" list -- I suggest having it skip gracefully instead of failing if it can't find the external spell checker.

-xdg

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Re^2: Improve the speling for you moduels documention by BUU (Prior) on Aug 03, 2005 at 14:06 UTC
In the same vein as the above ideas, what about just adding it as another target in the Makefile? I confess I have no idea how hard this would actually be, but it seems to make more sense to have the ability to do 'make spell', for example, seperately from the tests.	[reply]
Re^3: Improve the speling for you moduels documention by itub (Priest) on Aug 03, 2005 at 14:22 UTC
It's not too hard, but I prefer to add it as a test, while excluding it from the MANIFEST. That way I don't need to remember to run yet another make target when I prepare my distribution for upload.	[reply]
Re^4: Improve the speling for you moduels documention by xdg (Monsignor) on Aug 03, 2005 at 15:17 UTC
I get around that lazyness by having a release script that does it for me (which checks out the proper tagged branch from my subversion repository, Builds the distribution, runs all tests and checks, refreshes the metafiles, and only if all those pass, prompts me to go ahead and hand it off to cpan-upload). I'm a religious user of Module::Build's "Build testpod" -- and it's part of my script. I may see about writing a patch for Module::Build to use Pod::Spell (if available) for a "testpodspell" action that I can add in similarly. -xdg Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.	[reply]