With Summer of Code’s mid-term evaluations coming up, some interesting things
are about to happen to grok. I was contacted by Herbert Breunung, author of
Perl6::Doc (formerly
Perl6::Bible), which is a project that shares some of grok’s goals.
He told me that he doesn’t have enough time to maintain his project anymore
and would like some sort of merge to happen. I said I’d look into it. His
project bundles all the Synopses, Apocalypses, Exegeses, and some other Perl 6
documentation, and ships with a perldoc wrapper for reading them. What I
would like to do is to move all documentation out of the grok distribution
and update/add more to Perl6::Doc while eliminating the perldoc wrapper
(in favor of grok).
He also brought to my attention the Perl Table Index,
a sort of Perl 6 glossary. Ahmad Zawawi has just patched
his Padre::Plugin::Perl6 to
feed this index to grok. I will probably port the Perl Table Index to the
Perl6::Doc distribution and make grok look things up in it.
I’ve started writing a Pod::Text subclass as well as amending Perl6::Perldoc::To::Ansi to conform to a consistent color scheme when using the default ANSI-colored output.
Something which grok should eventually be able to do is recognize arbitrary
Perl 6 syntax (at very fine level of granularity, that is) and tell you what
it means. A first stab at this will be to simply include a table of some
common ones and look those up. Stuff like my, +, and so on. Doing this
reliably is the original inspiration for the u4x project (Userdocs for
Christmas), of which grok is a part.
I hope to make a release of grok and Perl6::Doc shortly which will include
all of the above.