Re: [sprog-users] How to add help to created gears?

[Grant M. <gr...@mc...>]

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 20:41 -0400, Dick McCurdy wrote: 
> I am a novice with Sprog but am getting to like it. I have created
> some new gears by modifying the properties of existing gears and
> saving them. I am told that the files are Perl classes (*.pm) files
> but do not have help information. 

Yes, if you create a new gear to wrap an external command, using the
"Make Command Gear" menu option, Sprog will generate a .pm file but it
won't generate the "Help" documentation.

> I do not speak Perl. Can I just simply edit the .pm class files and
> add the help information to the existing new gears? A look at the
> distributed gear .pm files shows that the help information is appended
> to the file (at the end.) 

Yes, the documentation is in Perl's "Plain Old Documentation" (POD)
format with one minor modification.  There are two 'levels' of
documentation: 

* normal POD sections will be readable using standard perldoc tools
   but will not appear in the Sprog 'Help' viewer (these are normally
   used for developer-to-developer docs

* a pod section preceded by '=begin :sprog-help-text' and followed by
   '=end :sprog-help-text' will be displayed in the Sprog Help viewer

So yes, you could just edit of of the generated .pm files, and add a
sprog-help-text section (possibly by copying from another gear file and
editing).

There's more information on the POD format here:

  http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perlpod.pod

> Also can gears that are not useful be deleted from the Sprog::Gear
> class? For example, I have no Apache log files to parse.

Not at the moment, although it is on the TODO list for a future release.

Regards
Grant