podlators 4.00

podlators is the distribution that includes the Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules for Perl, plus the pod2man and pod2text driver scripts (among a few other, more minor things).

I've been working on a new release of this for a couple of years and got trapped in a cycle of always wanting to finish up one more thing before making a release. (Really need to fix Unicode handling once and for all! Oh, I have a much better idea for how to do testing! I should really revise all of this code for my current coding style!) But some discussions elsewhere reminded me of the merits of release early and often, so I decided to finally put something out.

There are quite a few accumulated changes, although not as many as the major version increase would indicate. I did that so that I could standardize on the same version number in all of the modules and switch to a much simpler versioning scheme. That required increasing the major version to something higher than all the component modules.

Other than that, there are mostly a bunch of bug fixes, but also a lot of changes to Pod::Man to support Debian's reproducible build effort. The code is now more predictable and reliable about how it generates dates, and supports two new ways of forcing the date in generated documentation to a particular value so that builds are more predictable.

I also changed the build system over to Module::Build, although it also provides a Makefile.PL file so that it can be built as part of Perl core.

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