Sure, that's one way to do it. Currently, almost everything for PDL is written using the PDL::PP, which generates XS code and .pm files. We could change our distribution such that the XS generation would happen on the developer's machine, though the XS files would still have to compile on the installer's machine. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody involved in PDL at the moment knows the PDL::PP sub-system well enough to separate the XS generation step from the compilation step.
You're right, though - that would solve the problem.
| [reply] |
You do know that if you have code in 'Foo.pm', you can put POD in 'Foo.pod', and 'perldoc Foo' fetches the POD from 'Foo.pod' instead of 'Foo.pm', don't you? That means that if you generate the .pm file at compile, you can still ship a complete .pod file.
| [reply] |
Yes, I was aware of that. It's very handy. But CPAN will look at every file and check if it has any pod; if it detects some it will try to parse the pod and create a link to it from your distribution's page. This is nice because it means you can have POD embedded in your C-code (if you have any) and CPAN will display it for you. This behavior is what I was trying to avoid, but I just realized yesterday that therein lies the key to my solution, which I'll elaborate in a less-indented response. Thanks for your ideas! :)
| [reply] |