DocKnot 1.03 (package documentation generator) Maintained by Russ Allbery Copyright 2013-2018 Russ Allbery . This software is distributed under a BSD-style license. Please see the section LICENSE below for more information. BLURB DocKnot is a system for generating consistent human-readable software package documentation from metadata files and templates. The metadata is primarily JSON files, but can include files of documentation snippets. The goal is to generate both web pages and distributed documentation files (such as README) from the same source, using templates for consistency across multiple packages. DESCRIPTION After years of maintaining a variety of small free software packages, I found the most tedious part of making a new release was updating the documentation in multiple locations. Copyright dates would change, prerequisites and package descriptions would change, and I had to update at least the package README file and its web pages separately. The last straw was when GitHub became popular and I wanted to provide a Markdown version of README as well, avoiding the ugly text rendering on the GitHub page for a package. This package uses one metadata directory as its source information and generates all the various bits of documentation for a package. This allows me to make any changes in one place and then just regenerate the web page, included documentation, and other files to incorporate those changes. It also lets me make changes to the templates to improve shared wording and push that out to every package I maintain during its next release, without having to remember which changes I wanted to make. DocKnot was designed and written for my personal needs, and I'm not sure it will be useful for anyone else. At the least, the template files are rather specific to my preferences about how to write package documentation, and the web page output is in my personal thread language as opposed to HTML. I'm not sure if I'll have the time to make it a more general tool. But you're certainly welcome to use it if you find it useful, send pull requests to make it more general, or take ideas from it for your own purposes. Currently included in this package are just the App::DocKnot module (which contains most of the logic), a small docknot driver program, and the templates I use for my own software. Over time, it may include more of my web publishing framework, time permitting. REQUIREMENTS Perl 5.18 or later and Module::Build are required to build this module. The following additional Perl modules are required to use it: * File::BaseDir * File::ShareDir * JSON * Perl6::Slurp * Template (part of Template Toolkit) IPC::System::Simple is required to run the test suite. The following additional Perl modules will be used by the test suite if present: * Devel::Cover * Test::MinimumVersion * Test::Perl::Critic * Test::Pod * Test::Pod::Coverage * Test::Spelling * Test::Strict * Test::Synopsis All are available on CPAN. Those tests will be skipped if the modules are not available. To enable tests that don't detect functionality problems but are used to sanity-check the release, set the environment variable RELEASE_TESTING to a true value. To enable tests that may be sensitive to the local environment or that produce a lot of false positives without uncovering many problems, set the environment variable AUTHOR_TESTING to a true value. BUILDING AND INSTALLATION DocKnot uses Module::Build and can be installed using the same process as any other Module::Build module: perl Build.PL ./Build ./Build test ./Build install You will have to run the last command as root unless you're installing into a local Perl module tree in your home directory. SUPPORT The DocKnot web page at: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/docknot/ will always have the current version of this package, the current documentation, and pointers to any additional resources. For bug tracking, use the CPAN bug tracker at: https://rt.cpan.org/Dist/Display.html?Name=App-DocKnot However, please be aware that I tend to be extremely busy and work projects often take priority. I'll save your report and get to it as soon as I can, but it may take me a couple of months. SOURCE REPOSITORY DocKnot is maintained using Git. You can access the current source on GitHub at: https://github.com/rra/docknot or by cloning the repository at: https://git.eyrie.org/git/devel/docknot.git or view the repository via the web at: https://git.eyrie.org/?p=devel/docknot.git The eyrie.org repository is the canonical one, maintained by the author, but using GitHub is probably more convenient for most purposes. Pull requests are gratefully reviewed and normally accepted. It's probably better to use the CPAN bug tracker than GitHub issues, though, to keep all Perl module issues in the same place. LICENSE The DocKnot package as a whole is covered by the following copyright statement and license: Copyright 2013-2018 Russ Allbery Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. Some files in this distribution are individually released under different licenses, all of which are compatible with the above general package license but which may require preservation of additional notices. All required notices, and detailed information about the licensing of each file, are recorded in the LICENSE file. Files covered by a license with an assigned SPDX License Identifier include SPDX-License-Identifier tags to enable automated processing of license information. See https://spdx.org/licenses/ for more information. For any copyright range specified by files in this package as YYYY-ZZZZ, the range specifies every single year in that closed interval.