Introducing Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CoalescePod

Yup. Plucking the alpaca’s eyebrows again, I’m afraid…

You see, because of merciless peer pressure, I’ve revived Perl::Achievements. I thought that would keep the wolves at bay, but noooo… Not a hour after the announcement was sent, I got a new feature request. I really should not but… okay, I wanted to do it anyway and if somebody is actually asking for it, why the heck not? Plus, it’ll give me the opportunity to see if my Template::Caribou is up to snuff.

A few hours later, I have a bug report for MooseX::App::Cmd and (after some touch-ups) released the first version of Template::Caribou on CPAN.

And that’s roughly where things get silly…

You see, while I like to keep the pod of functions and methods with their implementation, the big fluffy sections like SYNOPSIS and DESCRIPTION lumbering at the top of the module files kinda get in my way. Of course, as I’m using Dist::Zilla and its Pod::Weaver goodness, I could also punt them at the bottom of the file and let the weaver reorder them at building time.

Or… I could push the idea an inch further, have those sections in their own pod file, and have them merged back to their corresponding modules at building time.

Which is exactly what Dist::Zilla::Plugin::CoalescePod does. For each pod file it finds, it checks if a corresponding module exist. If it does, The pod is appended at the end of the file verbatim (to be later on munged and reorganized by Pod::Weaver) and the pod file itself removed.

And now that all of this is out of my system, I can return to Perl::Achievements.

Well, I should probably update Dist::Zilla::PluginBundle::YANICK first.

…the Yak shaving. It never stops. It… just… never… stops. *sob*