| PERLMODSTYLE(1) | Perl Programmers Reference Guide | PERLMODSTYLE(1) |
While this document is intended to be useful to all module authors, it is particularly aimed at authors who wish to publish their modules on CPAN.
The focus is on elements of style which are visible to the users of a module, rather than those parts which are only seen by the module's developers. However, many of the guidelines presented in this document can be extrapolated and applied successfully to a module's internals.
This document differs from perlnewmod in that it is a style guide rather than a tutorial on creating CPAN modules. It provides a checklist against which modules can be compared to determine whether they conform to best practice, without necessarily describing in detail how to achieve this.
All the advice contained in this document has been gleaned from extensive conversations with experienced CPAN authors and users. Every piece of advice given here is the result of previous mistakes. This information is here to help you avoid the same mistakes and the extra work that would inevitably be required to fix them.
The first section of this document provides an itemized checklist; subsequent sections provide a more detailed discussion of the items on the list. The final section, "Common Pitfalls", describes some of the most popular mistakes made by CPAN authors.
Good places to look for pre-existing modules include <http://search.cpan.org/> and <https://metacpan.org> and asking on "module-authors@perl.org" (<http://lists.perl.org/list/module-authors.html>).
If an existing module almost does what you want, consider writing a patch, writing a subclass, or otherwise extending the existing module rather than rewriting it.
Your module should have a clearly defined scope which is no longer than a single sentence. Can your module be broken down into a family of related modules?
Bad example:
"FooBar.pm provides an implementation of the FOO protocol and the related BAR standard."
Good example:
"Foo.pm provides an implementation of the FOO protocol. Bar.pm implements the related BAR protocol."
This means that if a developer only needs a module for the BAR standard, they should not be forced to install libraries for FOO as well.
When naming your module, consider the following:
You should also try to get feedback from people who are already familiar with the module's application domain and the CPAN naming system. Authors of similar modules, or modules with similar names, may be a good place to start, as are community sites like Perl Monks <http://www.perlmonks.org>.
In Perl Best Practices (copyright 2004, Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.), Damian Conway provides a list of criteria to use when deciding if OO is the right fit for your problem:
Think carefully about whether OO is appropriate for your module. Gratuitous object orientation results in complex APIs which are difficult for the average module user to understand or use.
If your routine iterates through some kind of list (such as a list of files, or records in a database) you may consider providing a callback so that users can manipulate each element of the list in turn. File::Find provides an example of this with its "find(\&wanted, $dir)" syntax.
display_day();
display_week();
display_year();
than
display_day();
week_display();
show_year();
This applies equally to method names, parameter names, and anything else which is visible to the user (and most things that aren't!)
$obj->do_something(
name => "wibble",
type => "text",
size => 1024,
);
... than to have a long list of unnamed parameters like this:
$obj->do_something("wibble", "text", 1024);
While the list of arguments might work fine for one, two or even three arguments, any more arguments become hard for the module user to remember, and hard for the module author to manage. If you want to add a new parameter you will have to add it to the end of the list for backward compatibility, and this will probably make your list order unintuitive. Also, if many elements may be undefined you may see the following unattractive method calls:
$obj->do_something(undef, undef, undef, undef, undef, 1024);
Provide sensible defaults for parameters which have them. Don't make your users specify parameters which will almost always be the same.
The issue of whether to pass the arguments in a hash or a hashref is largely a matter of personal style.
The use of hash keys starting with a hyphen ("-name") or entirely in upper case ("NAME") is a relic of older versions of Perl in which ordinary lower case strings were not handled correctly by the "=>" operator. While some modules retain uppercase or hyphenated argument keys for historical reasons or as a matter of personal style, most new modules should use simple lower case keys. Whatever you choose, be consistent!
Configurable error handling can be very useful to your users. Consider offering a choice of levels for warning and debug messages, an option to send messages to a separate file, a way to specify an error-handling routine, or other such features. Be sure to default all these options to the commonest use.
The level of detail in Perl module documentation generally goes from less detailed to more detailed. Your SYNOPSIS section should contain a minimal example of use (perhaps as little as one line of code; skip the unusual use cases or anything not needed by most users); the DESCRIPTION should describe your module in broad terms, generally in just a few paragraphs; more detail of the module's routines or methods, lengthy code examples, or other in-depth material should be given in subsequent sections.
Ideally, someone who's slightly familiar with your module should be able to refresh their memory without hitting "page down". As your reader continues through the document, they should receive a progressively greater amount of knowledge.
The recommended order of sections in Perl module documentation is:
Keep your documentation near the code it documents ("inline" documentation). Include POD for a given method right above that method's subroutine. This makes it easier to keep the documentation up to date, and avoids having to document each piece of code twice (once in POD and once in comments).
An INSTALL file should be included, and should contain simple installation instructions. When using ExtUtils::MakeMaker this will usually be:
When using Module::Build, this will usually be:
Release notes or changelogs should be produced for each release of your software describing user-visible changes to your module, in terms relevant to the user.
Unless you have good reasons for using some other format (for example, a format used within your company), the convention is to name your changelog file "Changes", and to follow the simple format described in CPAN::Changes::Spec.
The most common CPAN version numbering scheme looks like this:
1.00, 1.10, 1.11, 1.20, 1.30, 1.31, 1.32
A correct CPAN version number is a floating point number with at least 2 digits after the decimal. You can test whether it conforms to CPAN by using
perl -MExtUtils::MakeMaker -le 'print MM->parse_version(shift)' \
'Foo.pm'
If you want to release a 'beta' or 'alpha' version of a module but don't want CPAN.pm to list it as most recent use an '_' after the regular version number followed by at least 2 digits, eg. 1.20_01. If you do this, the following idiom is recommended:
our $VERSION = "1.12_01"; # so CPAN distribution will have
# right filename
our $XS_VERSION = $VERSION; # only needed if you have XS code
$VERSION = eval $VERSION; # so "use Module 0.002" won't warn on
# underscore
With that trick MakeMaker will only read the first line and thus read the underscore, while the perl interpreter will evaluate the $VERSION and convert the string into a number. Later operations that treat $VERSION as a number will then be able to do so without provoking a warning about $VERSION not being a number.
Never release anything (even a one-word documentation patch) without incrementing the number. Even a one-word documentation patch should result in a change in version at the sub-minor level.
Once picked, it is important to stick to your version scheme, without reducing the number of digits. This is because "downstream" packagers, such as the FreeBSD ports system, interpret the version numbers in various ways. If you change the number of digits in your version scheme, you can confuse these systems so they get the versions of your module out of order, which is obviously bad.
Most importantly, choose modules which are as stable as possible. In order of preference:
Specify version requirements for other Perl modules in the pre-requisites in your Makefile.PL or Build.PL.
Be sure to specify Perl version requirements both in Makefile.PL or Build.PL and with "require 5.6.1" or similar. See the section on "use VERSION" of "require" in perlfunc for details.
The importance of these tests is proportional to the alleged stability of a module. A module which purports to be stable or which hopes to achieve wide use should adhere to as strict a testing regime as possible.
Useful modules to help you write tests (with minimum impact on your development process or your time) include Test::Simple, Carp::Assert and Test::Inline. For more sophisticated test suites there are Test::More and Test::MockObject.
If you don't know what license to use, dual licensing under the GPL and Artistic licenses (the same as Perl itself) is a good idea. See perlgpl and perlartistic.
Tutorials, end-user documentation, research papers, FAQs etc are not appropriate in a module's main documentation. If you really want to write these, include them as sub-documents such as "My::Module::Tutorial" or "My::Module::FAQ" and provide a link in the SEE ALSO section of the main documentation.
| 2019-10-21 | perl v5.30.3 |