Last night I braved
Winter Storm Juno to venture out to Albany Perl Mongers' technical meeting in East Greenbush. Our special guest star Jeff Thalhammer had agreed to teleconference in from San Francisco to talk us through
Perl::Critic. This arrangement worked pretty well for us, with Jeff able to chat with the small number of us that had braved the storm and answer our questions. The only flaw with the setup was Jeff wasn't able to try the pokemon cupcakes I'd baked. Bring on cupcake-over-ip technology is what I say.
I've been using Perl::Critic for many years now, and I wasn't sure I would get much out of the technical meeting, but I was very wrong. Jeff was able to give several tips, answer questions, and point out a bunch of improvements that I was unaware of since I first started using Perl::Critic years ago.
only
The biggest win for me was learning about using the
only option directly in a
.perlcriticrc itself. This allows you to only run the rules specified in the critic file rather than any installed rules and is awesome for continuous integration test suites running off our in-house
.perldcriticrc because if a new rule gets installed (due to an update our distribution dependencies) we don't start automatically using it (and failing it) without some sort of review.
verbose
The various levels of verbose output that Perl::Critic's
verbose options now provides are very helpful. Bumping the output to level 8 (with
--verbose=8) helpfully tells you the name of the policy that you're violating, which is useful if you want to disable it with a
## no critic (...), or tweak the
.perlcriticrc or simply read the documentation for the module so you can better understand what the policy is complaining about
profile-proto
My ancient personal
.perlcriticrc file is getting a bit long in the tooth. Not only has my coding style changed over the many years as I've learned more about Perl, but Perl::Critic itself has improved introducing new policies both in the core distribution and on the CPAN itself. This is why I was excited to learn about the
profile-proto which can spit out a fully-documented default
.perlcriticrc
Let's Go Shopping
Jeff took us on a brief
shopping tour of the CPAN to show us some of the cool new policies that are available. Some standouts include:
Thanks
Thanks to both Jeff for taking the time to talk to us, and to Patrick Cronin for once again organising the meeting, providing pizza and all the other thankless stuff he does to organise our meetings.