criticism - Perl pragma to enforce coding standards and best-practices



NAME

criticism - Perl pragma to enforce coding standards and best-practices


SYNOPSIS

  use criticism;
  use criticism 'gentle';
  use criticism 'stern';
  use criticism 'harsh';
  use criticism 'cruel';
  use criticism 'brutal';
  use criticism ( -profile => '/foo/bar/perlcriticrc' );
  use criticism ( -severity => 3, -verbose => '%m at %f line %l' );


DESCRIPTION

This pragma enforces coding standards and promotes best-practices by running your file through the Perl::Critic manpage before every execution. In a production system, this usually isn't feasible because it adds a lot of overhead at start-up. If you have a separate development environment, you can effectively bypass the criticism pragma by not installing the Perl::Critic manpage in the production environment. If the Perl::Critic manpage can't be loaded, then criticism just fails silently.

Alternatively, the perlcritic command-line (which is distributed with the Perl::Critic manpage) can be used to analyze your files on-demand and has some additional configuration features. And the Test::Perl::Critic manpage provides a nice interface for analyzing files during the build process.

If you'd like to try the Perl::Critic manpage without installing anything, there is a web-service available at http://perlcritic.com. The web-service does not yet support all the configuration features that are available in the native Perl::Critic API, but it should give you a good idea of what it does. You can also invoke the perlcritic web-service from the command line by doing an HTTP-post, such as one of these:

  $> POST http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl < MyModule.pm
  $> lwp-request -m POST http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl < MyModule.pm
  $> wget -q -O - --post-file=MyModule.pm http://perlcritic.com/perl/critic.pl

Please note that the perlcritic web-service is still alpha code. The URL and interface to the service are subject to change.


CONFIGURATION

If there is exactly one import argument, then it is taken to be a named equivalent to one of the numeric severity levels supported by the Perl::Critic manpage. For example, use criticism 'gentle'; is equivalent to setting the -severity => 5, which reports only the most dangerous violations. On the other hand, use criticism 'brutal'; is like setting the -severity => 1, which reports every violation. If there are no import arguments, then it defaults to 'gentle'.

If there is more than one import argument, then they will all be passed directly into the the Perl::Critic manpage constructor. So you can use whatever arguments are supported by Perl::Critic.

The criticism pragma will also obey whatever configurations you have set in your .perlcriticrc file. See CONFIGURATION in the Perl::Critic manpage for more details.


DIAGNOSTICS

Usually, the criticism pragma fails silently if it cannot load Perl::Critic. So by not installing Perl::Critic in your production environment, you can leave the criticism pragma in your production source code and it will still compile, but it won't be analyzed by Perl::Critic each time it runs.

However, if you set the DEBUG environment variable to a true value or run your program under the Perl debugger, you will get a warning when criticism fails to load the Perl::Critic manpage.


NOTES

The criticism pragma applies to the entire file, so it is not affected by scope or package boundaries and use-ing it multiple times will just cause it to repeatedly process the same file. There isn't a reciprocal no criticism pragma. However, the Perl::Critic manpage does support a pseudo-pragma that directs it to overlook certain lines or blocks of code. See BENDING THE RULES in the Perl::Critic manpage for more details.


AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer <thaljef@cpan.org>


COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of this license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.

 criticism - Perl pragma to enforce coding standards and best-practices