podlators 4.00 released

I'm pleased to announce release 4.00 of podlators.

podlators contains Pod::Man and Pod::Text modules which convert POD input
to *roff source output, suitable for man pages, or plain text.  It also
includes several subclasses of Pod::Text for formatted output to terminals
with various capabilities.  It is the source package for the Pod::Man and
Pod::Text modules included with Perl.

Changes from previous release:

    Increase the version number of the package to be larger than any of
    the previous version numbers of any of the modules, and change all
    modules to use the same version as the overall podlators package.
    Switch to a simple decimal version number to avoid complexity with
    v-strings and portability to old versions of Perl.

    podlators now requires Perl 5.006 or later.  All modules enable
    warnings.  Please report any unexpected or confusing warnings as bugs
    in the bug tracker.

    [pod2man] In previous versions, the -r or --release option could be
    specified without an argument and was interpreted as setting that
    value to the empty string.  That never made a great deal of sense, and
    the original change to Perl was apparently because no one realized one
    could pass the empty string as the argument value.  The argument is
    now mandatory, but may be the empty string, which will cause some
    *roff implementations to use the system default.

    Allow any even number of characters to be specified as the quote marks
    for Pod::Text and Pod::Man (and the corresponding --quotes options of
    pod2text and pod2man), rather than being artificially limited to one-
    or two-character quotes.  The first half of the string will be used as
    the left quote and the second half as the right quote.  This allows
    Unicode characters or groff escapes like \(lq and \(rq to be used.
    (Partly addresses #103298)

    [Pod::Man] Attempt to detect if the input came from a pipe and
    therefore has a completely unhelpful (and nonreproducible) source file
    name, and diagnose this as an error.  Document that the name option
    (--name to pod2man) is required when processing POD source from
    standard input.  (Debian Bug#777405)

    [Pod::Man] Honor the environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH and use it
    as the timestamp from which to derive the left-hand footer if the date
    option is not set, overriding the timestamp of the input file.  This
    is primarily useful to ensure reproducible builds of the same output
    file given the same souce and Pod::Man version, even when file
    timestamps may not be consistent.  Thanks, Niko Tyni.  (Debian
    Bug#801621)

    [Pod::Man] Honor the environment variable POD_MAN_DATE and use its
    contents, if set, as the value of the left-hand footer if the date
    option is not set, overriding the timestamp of the input file.  This
    was an earlier version of SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, but has been supported in
    Debian for a while and doesn't serve exactly the same purpose, so both
    continue to be supported.  Thanks, Niko Tyni.

    [Pod::Man] The default left-hand footer date is now based on UTC
    rather than the local time zone to make the output more reproducible.
    Thanks, Chris Lamb.  (Debian Bug#780259)

    [Pod::Man] Simplify the preamble code for handling the F register and
    index entries, and add backslashes after the braces in the preamble
    code for handling the F register to avoid introducing a spurious page
    break before at the first page with AT&T *roff.  Thanks, Carsten
    Kunze and Daphne Pfister.  (#92979)

    [Pod::Man] Support setting the left-hand footer to the empty string.

    Fix documentation of the utf8 option to Pod::Man and Pod::Text, and
    the corresponding -u option to pod2man and pod2text, to reflect that
    Pod::Simple now autodetects Latin-1 and UTF-8 but warns.

    More clearly document the options that set values in the .TH header in
    the pod2man and Pod::Man documentation.  Thanks, Guillem Jover.
    (#103297)

    [Pod::Text] Fix encoding handling in documents that start without an
    encoding declaration and then declare an encoding partway through.
    Previously, this would result in attempts to print wide characters if
    there were non-ASCII characters in the document.  Thanks, Magnolia K.
    (#101722)

    [Pod::Text] Change the documentation to not say Pod::Text only
    generates ASCII text.  (#89355)

    Switch the preferred module build system to Module::Build, but still
    provide a Makefile.PL file for backward compatibility and for the use
    of Perl core.  (#108714)

    Installation of this package no longer tries to overwrite the Pod::Man
    and Pod::Text modules that come with Perl core, and instead relies on
    the normal precedence rules in Perl's module search path that prefer
    locally-installed modules over core modules.

    Rename NEWS to Changes to match the normal Perl convention.

    Work around a bug in Term::Cap 1.16 that caused the test suite to fail
    by forcing a setting of TERMPATH to a termcap file provided by the
    test suite while running tests.  (#98272)

You can download it from:

    <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/podlators/>

or from CPAN.  This package is maintained using Git; see the instructions
on the above page to access the Git repository.

Debian packages have been uploaded to Debian unstable.

Please let me know of any problems or feature requests not already listed
in the TODO file.

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

• podlators 4.00 released by Russ Allbery