in reply to No good deed goes unpunished

So, you write POD and you don't even look at the output of pod2text? Forgetting a =cut will put a lot more into the produced documentation, it's not something you'll miss by even only glancing at the output of whatever podlator you use.

That's like shipping code without even bothering to see whether it compiles.

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Re^2: No good deed goes unpunished
by JadeNB (Chaplain) on Aug 03, 2009 at 05:31 UTC
    This seems unnecessarily harsh. It sounds like talexb was testing his code, found errors, and tracked down the source. There's no clear indication that anything flawed was released, and the error was fixed; so why complain that he tested the code before the POD?

    I'm particularly happy with No good deed goes unpunished because I was, literally, just this minute reading through perlpod and wondering "Do I have to end a =begin/=end block with a =cut?", but feeling too lazy to test.

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      What had I changed or added recently? Why, nothing but POD, your honour, honest.

      That reads to me like talexb had working code, added pod, then noticed that the code had stopped working and started tracking it down as a code problem without at any point having looked at the documentation created by the pod he'd added. I have to agree with JavaFan's reaction of "why are you bothering to add pod if you're not going to run pod2text over it and see what it outputs?"

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          I have to agree with JavaFan's reaction of "why are you bothering to add pod if you're not going to run pod2text over it and see what it outputs?"

        Because POD is relatively new to me. I'd never heard of podchecker before Anonymonk mentioned it to me. And you're right, I had working code and then went back and documented it, which then broke things. Lesson learned.

        Alex / talexb / Toronto

        "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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Re^2: No good deed goes unpunished
by talexb (Chancellor) on Aug 04, 2009 at 13:51 UTC
      So, you write POD and you don't even look at the output of pod2text?

    Apparently, yes.

    But that's going to change -- one of the things that I thought about as I renovated my basement this weekend was how to check for that particular problem. My solution is to make it one of the steps in the Makefile, so that if it fails, the package isn't created.

    Hey, if I'm still learning after ten years with the language, that's better than declaring I know everything there is to know and closing my mind. Did that once with C and had a pretty rude awakening. But that's a story for another time.

    Thanks for the feedback.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    "Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

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