>I don't think that the documentation should be removed from the core
>distribution, BUT I do think that there should be an "easter egg" that
>allows people to build a Perl distribution without documentation or
>whatever else they choose. There have been times that I've
>wanted/needed to build a "tinyperl" (even smaller than "miniperl" :-) )
>and I've had to hack things significantly to Make It So.
The documentation is 700k compressed, or about thrice that otherwise.
% cat /usr/local/perl/lib/pod/*.pod | gzip -9 -v | wc
65.7%
2564 15232 696465
% cat /usr/local/perl/lib/pod/*.pod | wc
61212 313779 2031560
If you remove it, you will no longer have a functioning Perl distribution.
% perl -Mdiagnostics -we 'print $a + 1'
Name "main::a" used only once: possible typo at -e line 1 (#1)
(W once) Typographical errors often show up as unique variable names.
If you had a good reason for having a unique name, then just mention
it again somehow to suppress the message. The our declaration is
provided for this purpose.
Use of uninitialized value in addition (+) at -e line 1 (#2)
(W uninitialized) An undefined value was used as if it were already defined. It
was
interpreted as a "" or a 0, but maybe it was a mistake. To suppress this
warning assign a defined value to your variables.
% sudo chmod 0 /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0/pod/perldiag.pod
% perl -Mdiagnostics -we 'print $a + 1'
couldn't find diagnostic data in /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0/pod/perldiag.pod
/home/tchrist/perldoc/lib /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0/OpenBSD.i386-openbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/OpenBSD.i386-openbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.00554/OpenBSD.i386-openbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.00554
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005/OpenBSD.i386-openbsd
/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.005 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl . -e at
/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.6.0/diagnostics.pm line 241, <POD_DIAG> line 549.
Compilation failed in require, <POD_DIAG> line 549.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted, <POD_DIAG> line 549.
Exit 2
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Permit me to repeat: if you remove the documentation, you will no |
| longer have a functioning Perl distribution. |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
And yes, I intend to make more of these, too.
--tom
