# New Ticket Created by James E Keenan # Please include the string: [perl #128048] # in the subject line of all future correspondence about this issue. # <URL: https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=128048 >
One of the joys of Perl 5 is that at the command-line I can issue a command like: ##### perldoc DBI ##### ... and get the author's documentation fed into a pager and highlighted in man-like style. Yesterday, I started using the 'DBIish' library which is bundled with Rakudo Star. https://github.com/perl6/DBIish states that I should be able to read the documentation with: ##### perl6 --doc <filename> ##### But that presumes I know (a) the basename of the file in which the documentation is found; and (b) the path to that file. Perl 5's 'perldoc' (at least in its simplest and most common usage) requires neither. It gets worse. If I go to the top-level directory for my Rakudo Star installation and search the tree for files with 'DBIish' in their names, I come up with nothing. That, I am told, is because the files are there only renamed with SHA1 hashes in their filenames. So I then have to ack or grep the tree and hope for the best. Eventually I came up with: ##### perl6 --doc share/perl6/site/sources/8B5538E93290C550228635C3FE5A7111890C4339 ##### ... which appears to show in the terminal the documentation found at https://github.com/perl6/DBIish/blob/master/lib/DBIish.pm6. Moreover, 'perl6 --doc <filename>' appears to neither page the documentation nor highlight it as 'man' and 'perldoc' do. Here, at least, I had the advantage that I knew that DBIish was bundled with Rakudo Star, so I could make a reasonable guess as to where to start searching within the file system. But I would have been considerably more lost if I had installed this library from CPAN (or wherever Perl6 libraries are housed -- I haven't gotten that far yet). As I noted in #perl6, this falls into the category of "barriers to adoption to the Perl6 language." Is there a plan to remedy the situation? Thank you very much. -- James E Keenan (jkee...@cpan.org)
