podlators 2.5.0

podlators is the package that contains Pod::Man and Pod::Text and the pod2man and pod2text driver scripts, which convert Perl's POD documentation format into text and *roff (for man pages) output.

This release is a "clearing the decks" release that rolls up various smallish feature requests and bug fixes that have been pending for a while. I want to do the same reworking to podlators that I did to Term::ANSIColor, but it's going to take longer since it's quite a bit more code. (And Term::ANSIColor took me about two days.) I didn't want to block the various pending issues on that work, so this tries to clean up all the open bugs I was aware of other than sorting out the defaults for Unicode output. (That's a much larger problem and will probably be fixed in a major release.)

The primary change is that pod2man and pod2text now die by default if the POD contains syntax errors. This will hopefully flush out numerous POD documents around the world that have been carrying POD ERRORS sections around forever. I considered just warning by default but not failing, since this will also cause CPAN builds to fail, and I may fall back to that if there are too many complaints. But usually fixing the POD syntax is straightforward, and normally parsing programs will fail on syntax errors.

Note that the defaults for the modules, Pod::Man and Pod::Text, continue to be to add a POD ERRORS section, since aborting inside a module isn't very friendly to the caller.

There is a new option for both the modules and the driver scripts to set the error handling behavior, which can be set to die, report to standard error but continue, add a POD ERRORS section, or ignore errors entirely.

Also in this release is a new nourls option that suppresses the URLs in text and *roff output for L<> codes that have anchor text, which can declutter some POD texts, and fixes for X<> formatting codes containing whitespace and small-caps handling of paragraphs consisting entirely of all-caps text.

You can get the latest release from the podlators distribution page.