It's really not a big deal, though. For the immediate problem, let's just make an exception and leave the hints out of Perl files with __END__ or __DATA__ blocks.
Sounds good. I can update the Perl::Critic policy, and make a note in pdd07.
Mark it as a cage cleaner task for some point down the road: figure out how to encourage good formatting habits, without assuming that everyone uses emacs or vim, and with minimal clutter in our source code.
This is a good idea. Some kind of repository-wide hints thingy would be great, but if we can't do that now it's not a big problem. Apologies about the amount of dust this topic threw up - I just wanted to close the ticket for bug day. :-/ Nevertheless, thanks everyone for their comments, it seems it wasn't such a simple problem to solve after all. Regards, Paul