Mark Allen

Pod::Perldoc is a "dual-life module" that ships with Perl core, but also sits outside of it. Over the weekend, I released Pod::Perldoc 3.17 which incorporates several bug fixes and adds several new features.

In the latest release we've:

• Added better support for UTF8 in the pod -> *roff -> *roff-formatter -> pager pipeline - unfortunately a lot of UTF8 support for pod remains at the mercy of *roff-formatters. People running perl on Mac OS X, for example, will get old crufty versions of groff that do not process UTF8 input, even though Pod::Man supports UTF8 output.

• Improved support for $PAGER and $PERLDOCPAGER definitions that expect pipelines or input redirection

• Improved behavior of -l -q

• Added two new formatter classes (ToANSI and ToTerm) which bypass many of the UTF8 problems with *roff-formatters.

• Made it easier for downstream utilities to define their own command line arguments

• Closed over 20 bug tickets on the RT queue. Some of these bug reports were years old unfortunately.

One area where Pod::Perldoc needs definite improvement is in a test suite. It has almost no tests, and the tests it does have are very basic. This is an area I intend to address on an on-going basis, but in order to make the Pod::Perldoc which ships with Perl 5.16 the best it can be, I would appreciate more testing from a wider audience of installations and operating systems.

An easy way to do this without risk to your other perl installations is to set up a "perldoc-testing" instance of perl inside of perlbrew where you can install Pod::Perldoc 3.17 from CPAN after the fact. (Note: Pod::Perldoc now requires at least perl 5.6 due to heavy use of "3-argument" open in several refactorings.)

Bug reports, comments or questions are best directed to the RT queue, but I will cheerfully review pull requests or Issues on the Pod::Perldoc github repository.

Thanks!