NAME

Pod::Minicpandoc - perldoc that works for modules you don't have installed

SYNOPSIS

    mcpandoc File::Find
        -- shows the documentation of your installed File::Find

    mcpandoc Acme::BadExample
        -- works even if you don't have Acme::BadExample installed!

    mcpandoc -c Text::Xslate
        -- shows the changelog file for Text::Xslate

    mcpandoc -v '$?'
        -- passes everything through to regular perldoc

    mcpandoc -m Acme::BadExample | grep system
        -- options are respected even if the module was scraped

    vim `mcpandoc -l Web::Scraper`
        -- getting the idea yet?

    mcpandoc http://darkpan.org/Eval::WithLexicals::AndGlobals
        -- URLs work too!

DESCRIPTION

mcpandoc is a perl script that acts like perldoc except that if it would have bailed out with No documentation found for "Uninstalled::Module", it will instead consult your minicpan, or scrape a CPAN index for the module's documentation if that doesn't work. It is a fork of cpandoc, with added support for consulting a minicpan.

One important feature of mcpandoc is that it only scrapes the live index if you do not have the module installed and if it cannot grab it from your minicpan. So if you use mcpandoc on a module you already have installed, then it will just read the already-installed documentation. This means that the version of the documentation matches up with the version of the code you have. As a fringe benefit, mcpandoc will be fast for modules you've installed. :)

All this means that you should be able to drop in mcpandoc in place of perldoc and have everything keep working. See "SNEAKY INSTALL" for how to do this.

If you set the environment variable MCPANDOC_FETCH to a true value, then we will print a message to STDERR telling you that mcpandoc is going to make a request against the live CPAN index.

SNEAKY INSTALL

    cpanm Pod::Minicpandoc

    then: alias perldoc=mcpandoc
    or:   function perldoc () { mcpandoc "$@" }

    Now `perldoc Acme::BadExample` works!

perldoc should continue to work for everything that you're used to, since mcpandoc passes all options through to it. mcpandoc is merely a subclass that falls back to scraping a CPAN index when it fails to find your queried file in @INC.

SEE ALSO

Pod::Cpandoc, CPAN::Mini

The sneaky install was inspired by https://github.com/defunkt/hub.

http://tech.bayashi.jp/archives/entry/perl-module/2011/003305.html

http://perladvent.org/2011/2011-12-15.html

http://sartak.org/talks/yapc-na-2011/cpandoc/

AUTHOR

Shawn M Moore sartak@gmail.com (original implementation), Rob Hoelz rob@hoelz.ro (minicpan support)

THANKS

Many thanks to Shawn M Moore, for writing Pod::Cpandoc and giving me something base this on!

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2011-2013 Robert Hoelz.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.