I want to make sure I understand what's being suggested here. I've been a
distracted lately, so I'm merrily doublechecking.
As far as I can tell, there's two distinct ideas that Autrijus is suggesting:
1) Get Pod parsers to support different input encodings, which all get
translated to Unicode in their internal form. (I.e., the "=for encoding
encname" just saves you the bother of running that file thru
encname2unicode before sending it to a Pod parser.)
I've been looking for some way in which this suggestion is problematic, and
I don't see any real problems, other than obvious trouble with old tools
not understanding odd encodings like UTF16.
(What do people think about my adding a rule that if you have a =for
encoding, it has to be the first Pod directive in a file? And the
corollary that you can't have two =for encoding's in a file.)
2) Get perldoc (Pod::Perldoc) to add a language "infix" to the filenames it
searches for pod under. So assume that currently, when I do "perldoc
Foo::Bar", it looks across @INC (etc) for:
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pod
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pm
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pl
Autrijus's suggestion, as I understand it, is simply to be able to say to
perldoc "hey, I like fr" (via a switch and/or env var), and have its search
be for:
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar_fr.pod
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar_fr.pm
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar_fr.pl
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pod
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pm
EACH-INC-DIR/Foo/Bar.pl
Right?
(Well, leaving aside the question of Bar_fr.pod versus Bar-fr.pod versus
Bar.fr.pod -- later on, we'll pick one way and stick with it.)
I'm tempted to say that this second suggestion seems fine to me as long as
this does NOT turn into a mess where anyone expects his "I like'fr" to
match the Foo/Bar-fr-ca.pm, or "fr-ca" to match the Foo/Bar-fr.pm.
I'm also tempted to say that these language tags must must must be
lowercase, always, under penalty of agonizing death. And also that it if
you provide a Bar-fr.pm, you must mention it in Bar.pm, so that no-one can
say "But how was I supposed to know that file was there? Read the MANIFEST?!"
Does this sound reasonable?
Did I understand everything right?
And: suggestion 1 and suggestion 2 are totally independent ideas, right?
--
Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/
