Is there a "poor man's" perldoc?
in [Perl]
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From: Bart Lateur on 5 Mar 2010 03:22 J�rgen Exner wrote: >"jl_post(a)hotmail.com" <jl_post(a)hotmail.com> wrote: >> I use the perldocs frequently when I'm programming in Perl. >>However, on some systems I've used, "perldoc" is apparently not >>installed (despite the fact that Perl is). > >Then you may want to kick the administrator until he fixes the broken >installation. Yeah, yeah. Why not complain against the people making the Linux distributions. A lot of them, if not all, separate the perl binary from the core modules. -- Bart.
From: jl_post on 5 Mar 2010 11:22 On Mar 4, 4:21 pm, Jürgen Exner <jurge...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > > Then you may want to kick the administrator until he fixes the broken > installation. That might work, if only I lived anywhere near the administrator. But in some cases, (s)he's in another country altogether. Sadly, some people just don't think the perldocs are all that important. Once I was working on a system maintained by a fellow co- worker who lived all the way across the country, and I needed the documentation for an important Perl script. I tried "perldoc"ing it, of course, but unfortunately the "perldoc" package was not installed. Over the phone I begged my co-worker to install the "perldoc" package but he didn't see the point. He figured that since we already had access to the Camel book there was nothing more that the perldocs could offer. Nevertheless, I succeeded in having him install the perldocs, after which I instantly pulled up all the relevant documentation. He was surprised. "How did you find that information so quickly?" he asked. I explained him it that all good modules have documentation that can be extracted with the "perldoc" package, but that the documentation can only be viewed if the "perldoc" package is properly installed. He then muttered something about the perldocs being more than what he thought they were, and went on his way to do something else. (With other administrators I haven't been so lucky. Many of them I don't even know personally, so I fire off an e-mail, and never hear from them.) While I agree with you 100% that system administrators should install the "perldoc" package along with Perl, if they happen to think it's redundant and not needed, convincing them otherwise is a bit like moving mountains. -- Jean-Luc
From: jl_post on 5 Mar 2010 11:31 On Mar 4, 3:27 pm, Ben Morrow <b...(a)morrow.me.uk> wrote: > > perldoc almost certainly *is* installed somewhere, > it's just not in your PATH. Check to see if your > /usr/bin/perl is a symlink somewhere, and if > the real binary has a 'perldoc' next to it. I just tried your suggestion on one account (where "perldoc" doesn't work) and sure enough, the file that "which perl" revealed was indeed a symlink to... another symlink! I followed that new symlink, and in that directory I found both the perl and the perldoc executables. So at least on that system, I can solve the perldoc problem by creating an alias. I'll have to try your suggestion on the system that lacks internet access -- next time I use it, that is. Thanks for your input, Ben. -- Jean-Luc
From: Sherm Pendley on 5 Mar 2010 11:44 Ben Morrow <ben(a)morrow.me.uk> writes: > perldoc almost certainly *is* installed somewhere That's not necessarily true. Many Linux systems package perldoc and the various .pod files into a separate perl-dev or similar package. sherm--
From: Sherm Pendley on 5 Mar 2010 11:51
"jl_post(a)hotmail.com" <jl_post(a)hotmail.com> writes: > That might work, if only I lived anywhere near the administrator. > But in some cases, (s)he's in another country altogether. There's this thing called "email," you see... :-) > Sadly, some people just don't think the perldocs are all that > important. Having perldocs on a production server is *not* important. You shouldn't be using that server for development work anyway. With VirtualBox et al, you can easily mirror whatever deployment config you need, right on your desktop, and install the tools and docs you need on that. sherm-- |