NAME

Perl::Critic::Policy::Modules::RequireBarewordIncludes

DESCRIPTION

When including another module (or library) via the require or use statements, it is best to identify the module (or library) using a bareword rather than an explicit path. This is because paths are usually not portable from one machine to another. Also, Perl automatically assumes that the filename ends in '.pm' when the library is expressed as a bareword. So as a side-effect, this Policy encourages people to write '*.pm' modules instead of the old-school '*.pl' libraries.

use 'My/Perl/Module.pm';  #not ok
use My::Perl::Module;     #ok

NOTES

This Policy is a replacement for ProhibitRequireStatements, which completely banned the use of require for the sake of eliminating the old '*.pl' libraries from Perl4. Upon further consideration, I realized that require is quite useful and necessary to enable run-time loading. Thus, RequireBarewordIncludes does allow you to use require, but still encourages you to write '*.pm' modules.

Sometimes, you may want to load modules at run-time, but you don't know at design-time exactly which module you will need to load (Perl::Critic is an example of this). In that case, just attach the '## no critic' pseudo-pragma like so:

require $module_name;  ## no critic

CREDITS

Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org> was instrumental in identifying the correct motivation for and behavior of this Policy. Thanks Chris.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer <thaljef@cpan.org>

Copyright (c) 2005-2007 Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer. All rights reserved.

COPYRIGHT

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.