Tie::ShadowHash 1.00

This is a Perl module that lets you stack multiple hash-like data sources together and treat them like a merged hash. Queries on the hash are satisfied by the first hash in the stack that has the desired key and iteration through the hash iterates through each in turn. You can store or delete elements from the hash and those changes are reflected in later uses, but the underlying data sources are not changed; all modifications are kept as local overrides. There's also some convenience support for treating text files as hashes.

I wrote this module eons ago and have always been fairly proud of it, but so far as I knew, no one ever used it. It was going to be used in a new version of News::Gateway, but as long-time followers of my development work know, that module is kind of cursed. So I'd mostly forgotten about it.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that Wiki::Toolkit started using it, and then someone wanted to package it for Debian! I found out about that because of a discussion on debian-perl about how to name the package, since I always used to abbreviate my CPAN distribution names and it was in CPAN as ShadowHash.

This release dusts the module off, converts the VCS from CVS to Git, updates the coding style and documentation, fixes the test suite to use Test::More, and fixes a few long-standing bugs that I noticed when reading through the code with fresh eyes. It also now has a proper 1.00 version number, since I don't expect to have to make backward-incompatible changes to it.

You can get the latest version from the Tie::ShadowHash distribution page.