A piggy bank of commands, fixes, succinct reviews, some mini articles and technical opinions from a (mostly) Perl developer.

POD servers for Perl

You want to browse Perl embedded documentation (POD)
You have some software that was designed for browsing information: a web browser
You need a server to turn the POD into web pages and serve it to the browser.

You try one of these modules:
  • https://metacpan.org/pod/Pod::Browser
    • Uses Catalyst
  • https://metacpan.org/pod/Pod::Server
    • ?
  • https://metacpan.org/pod/Pod::Webserver
    • Very basic
    • Parsing much better than Pod::POM::Web, but still fails in places.
    • Contains all the Perl built-in modules, which I don't want to see.
    • How to run: podwebserver
  • https://metacpan.org/pod/Pod::POM::Web
    • Advanced design
    • Fails to parse nested tags
    • Contains all the Perl built-in modules, which I don't want to see.
    • How to run: perl -I $DOC_PATH -I $POD_POM_WEB_PATH -MPod::POM::Web -e server

Questions:
  • What is the reference implementation of a POD interpreter? `perldoc` just removes links and it is plain text only. So in what viewer do the links actually link to something?