DSSS, Dsource, and cpan

[David B. Held]

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
> 
>>> Ddoc documentation may be important for some kind of projects, like 
>>> libraries. But for other types it simply doesn't matter. DSSS is a 
>>> good example -- I don't want to look into its code, but I wish to 
>>> have advanced documentaion. In some cases such documentation can't be 
>>> produced by ddoc and needs other tools (like LaTeX, DocBook, DocUtils 
>>> and ReStructuredText, etc). And for checking quality of documentation 
>>> a manual certification required. But see above :(
>>
>> You're right in the case of non-libraries. But I think the ddoc 
>> requirement should apply to libraries.
> 
> Not all projects use ddoc, some use for instance Doxygen instead...

All CPAN projects use PerlDoc, even though it's not the greatest 
documentation system ever invented.  However, there is something to be 
said for having consistent-looking documentation across an archive as 
big as CPAN.  That doesn't preclude the library author from having 
supplemental documentation in their favorite format, but I think it's 
perfectly reasonable to at least require a library overview in DDoc, for 
ease of integration.

Programs can choose to have their main documentation in another format 
(like PDF, even), but I still think there should be a "hook" that's in 
DDoc so that there is a uniform interface across the archive.

Dave