podlators 2.00

At long last.

Allison Randal has taken over maintainership of Pod::Simple and has released 3.03, including the patch to allow whitespace handling to be done properly. This was the last thing I was waiting for, so today I installed the new release and did my final testing and released podlators 2.00.

This is essentially a complete rewrite of both Pod::Text and Pod::Man from the previous release, based on a lot of work by Sean Burke. I can't say that I actually like Pod::Simple better than Pod::Parser, but I was one of the few people who liked Pod::Parser. Pod::Simple does clean up a few edge cases and minor bugs and, most importantly, it handles non-ASCII characters properly.

This release doesn't do the right thing with non-ASCII characters in Pod::Man. I want to add a special output mode that requires groff and uses UTF-8, but I haven't had a chance to work on that yet. The output from this release should be for the most part indistinguishable from the previous output of Pod::Man, except for a few minor bug fixes.

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

Note that the version of Pod::Simple in Debian unstable is 3.02, which won't work with the test suite and won't get whitespace correct. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to package podlators for Debian. I might; it will be a while before a new major release of Perl is out that contains the new version.