Buddy Burden

I released Test::File 1.33 yesterday, which fixed a minor MANIFEST glitch with 1.32, which I released three days ago.  (I know it’s been discussed before, but I guess I never really appreciated it: it sure would be nice if CPAN Testers could report stuff like that).  Version 1.32 fixes a number of CPAN RT tickets (in fact, it pretty much closes out all the open bugs), most of which you won’t care about.  If you happen to be using Windows, this may fix a number of test failures, although there are still a few left that I’m working with schwern to fix.  (If you are running Windows and you happen to see some mysterious errors which boil down to the fact that “skip” isn’t the same as “SKIP”, it’s definitely safe to ignore those.)

What may be less exciting to you, but is definitely more exciting to me, is that I finally, after weeks of trying, got Debuggit 2.02 released.  CPAN Testers kept me on my toes on this one, and I would guess that about half of my dev releases since 2.01 were simply fixes for stupid mistakes that CPAN Testers exposed.  Thanks again to Barbie for all his efforts; if you didn’t see his recent blog post, you should check it out.  (He gave a shout out to one of my blog posts, so I figure I can at least return the favor.)

Anyway, the substantive changes in Debuggit 2.02 are, first off, a major reorganization of the POD.  I am, in many respects, a compulsive documenter, and Debuggit is my first CPAN module, so it was overflowing with doco ... to the point where 80% of Debuggit.pm was POD.  Which is awesome if you need to know every single detail about Debuggit, but perhaps a bit overwhelming if you’re trying to check it out for the first time.  Taking a cue from Moose, I’ve split the POD up into Debuggit, Debuggit::Manual, and Debuggit::Cookbook.  Of course, Moose is a multi-module behemoth that constitutes a complete object system for Perl 5, whereas Debuggit is a kinda cool way to put debugging statements in your code, so it could well be argued that it’s a bit presumptuous of me to be taking cues from Moose.  But at least this way you can just ignore the extra documentation if you so desire.

Secondly, although I’ve been using various versions of Debuggit for over ten years now, I had never tried to use it in a CPAN-style module before, weirdly, so I never realized that, if you did that, and if you had a POD coverage test (such as many people recommend, and Dist::Zilla can provide automatically), it reports DEBUG and debuggit as “naked” subroutines.  Well, it did.  Now it doesn’t.

Finally, I fixed some “redefined” warnings in some corner cases, fixed a problem with overriding DEBUG in a single module, and then fixed the resulting problem of namespace::autoclean breaking stuff when it autocleaned DEBUG.  And I added a second way to verify that useing Debuggit adds no extra memory to your program (when debugging is off).

Hopefully something in all that is useful for someone somewhere.