Petal::Utils (was Re: [Petal] Looping through a hash)

[Steve Purkis]

On Friday, September 5, 2003, at 08:58  am, William McKee wrote:

>> I've got a few little plugins like this that might be good candidates
>> for a Petal::Utils package at some stage.
>
> Building a utils package has been on my to do list for several months
> now, so I used this opportunity to actually build it and combine 
> several
> of my modifiers. Since you had the idea first, would you like to create
> it and put it onto CPAN?

I can do, but if you'd like to take it on you're more than welcome.


> I have attached a tarfile of my initial version since it's less than 
> 4K.
> Comments appreciated. The broken tests have been commented out in the
> 01.t file.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling...  I've spent some time today 
adding my 2¢.  It's a bit more than 4K now, so I've put it up here:

	http://staging.quiup.com/perl/Petal-Utils-0.02.tar.gz

A lot of things have changed, mostly with the idea of expanding the 
module.  This design won't force plugins on a user that doesn't need 
them.  Things are loaded as needed now, which means the user isn't 
forced to load plugins they won't need - this should avoid NS pollution 
& decrease load time.

Here's a summary of the work done:

   *	Renamed to Petal::Utils so Petal doesn't think the Utils package
	is a Petal Hash modifier. [Steve Purkis]
   *	Moved to Module::Build. [Steve Purkis]
   +	Added modifiers: Date Dump Equal(eq) And Like Sort [Steve Purkis]
   +	Added import() functionality to specify modifier sets. [Steve 
Purkis]
   *	Split up modifiers into individual Petal::Utils::<modifier> modules
	that are loaded as needed. [Steve Purkis]
   *	Restructured test directory, using File::Spec and more verbose file
	names. [Steve Purkis]
   *	Added error handling code to existing modifiers. [Steve Purkis]

Jean-Michel: you might like to move Petal::Utils::Base into Petal 
itself (Petal::Plugin?).  This could result in more people writing 
plugins in a standard way for Petal (which would be a good thing, 
IMHO).  Moreover, parsing tools for $args could go in here.  At the 
moment, you've got to know a lot about Petal to parse $args properly 
(which incidently, Petal::Utils does *not* do).

-Steve