On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 1:52 PM, P Kishor <[email protected]> wrote:

> Breaking this thread into what should have been two threads to begin
> with...
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 1:45 PM, Judd Taylor <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> ..
> >
> > As far as documentation problems, it sounds like something went wrong
> > with your build of the .pd file, which autogenerates most of the OO
> > functions, and autogenerates the documentation as well. The PDL online
> > docs don't show any placeholders as you describe:
> > http://pdl.sourceforge.net/PDLdocs/IO/GD.html
> >
>
> Man, I never even considered looking at the above link. I usually just go
> to search.cpan.org, and that is where I see all the documentation gaps.
> See for yourself...
> <http://search.cpan.org/~chm/PDL-2.4.6/IO/GD/GD.pd<http://search.cpan.org/%7Echm/PDL-2.4.6/IO/GD/GD.pd>
> >
>
> The link you sent me at pdl.sf.net is indeed way more comprehensive.
>
> To the maintainers... is there a reason we have two locations for PDL
> stuff... cpan and sf? Can't they be merged, so when I say "tomahto"
> you don't understand "tomayto"?
>

Yes. The reason is because PDL::PP does a lot of documentation generation
for its authors. It was written with pdldoc - not CPAN - in mind. By the
time you try perldoc or pdldoc, all of the .pd files have been procesed and
you get pretty output. Anyway, this has led to a whole lot of documentation
that displays correctly with perldoc and pdldoc (and Padre), but not on
CPAN. It turns out that you can put in all sorts of things into the .pd
file  by hand that will make it display properly, but nobody has endeavored
to do this for the bulk of PDL. As my first project to fix this, I tackled
PDL::Slices, and you can compare the results. For best contrast, look near
the bottom of the pages:

http://search.cpan.org/~chm/PDL-2.4.6_001/Basic/Slices/slices.pd (corrected)
http://search.cpan.org/~chm/PDL-2.4.5/Basic/Slices/slices.pd (old)

I started working on PLplot but got sidetracked. I've had a mind to write up
how to clean up the old documentation and write new PDL documentation
guidelines, but I've not gotten around to it. For now, the rule of thumb is
this: use your local copy of the documentation (which for me displays
beautifully in Padre) or use the documentation generated for Sourceforge.
All sorts of people new to PDL will look on CPAN and will be confused until
it's fixed. I know it's a problem and I'm slowly working on it. Sorry I've
not covered more ground.

David
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