FVWM: Re: Documentation

From: Mikhael Goikhman <migo_at_homemail.com>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 00:30:33 +0000

We already use the pod documentation format in FVWM in perl tools:

  * fvwm-menu-directory
  * fvwm-menu-headlines
  * fvwm-menu-xlock
  * fvwm-perllib
  * all perllib classes
  * FvwmPerl

I would probably say more yes than no to use pod in all documentation,
but I don't see a lot of reasons for this.
Pod is pretty rich, but not as rich as the man page format.
As for me, both the man page format and pod are easy to write and read.

There are a lot of small things in pod (say, no center-justification in
man pages) that I don't like, it is just not configurable enough. I myself
even have somewhere a patched Pod::Man that fixes some annoyances, like
converting "run fvwm(1)" to "run the fvwm manpage", but it's not an option
for everyone to install it. Also fvwm-perllib fixes one bug in pod2man.

There is no easy way to define a plain-unformatted-lines text without
first padding it with at least one space, this looks ugly in SYNOPSYS and
other places. This padding feature is often misused, for example the pod
used in Pod::Parser class itself hardcodes the 12 spaces indentation,
which is bad if the output is html, not just man pages.

Of course if I would not be a pod fan, I would not create fvwm-perllib
that uses it in several interesting ways.

Regards,
Mikhael.
--
Visit the official FVWM web page at <URL: http://www.fvwm.org/>.
To unsubscribe from the list, send "unsubscribe fvwm" in the body of a
message to majordomo_at_fvwm.org.
To report problems, send mail to fvwm-owner_at_fvwm.org.
Received on Mon Aug 12 2002 - 19:31:48 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Mon Aug 29 2016 - 19:37:53 BST