/ 
Perl-Review-0.03
/ perlreview

NAME

perlreview - Command-line interface to critique Perl souce code

SYNOPSIS

perlreview [options] FILE  #Read from FILE
perlreview [options]       #Read from STDIN

DESCRIPTION

perlreview is the executable front-end to the Perl::Review engine. The Perl::Review distribution includes several policies based on the coding standards outlined in Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. I highly recommend that you get a copy!

ARGUMENTS

The only argument is the path to the file you wish to analyze. No more than one file can be specified at a time. If the file is not specified, then the input is read from STDIN.

OPTIONS

Option names can be abbreviated to uniqueness, and can be stated with singe or double dashes, and option values can be separated from the option name by a space or '=' (a la Getopt::Long).

-priority N

Sets the the maximum priority value of Policies that should be loaded from the configuration file. 1 is the "highest" priority, and all numbers larger than 1 have "lower" priority. Only Policies that have been configured with a priority value less than or equal to N will not be applied. For a given -profile, increasing the priority value will result in more violations. See "CONFIGURATION" for more details.

-profile FILE

Tells perlreview to use profile named by FILE rather than looking for the default file at .perlreviewrc in your home directory. See "CONFIGURATION" for more information.

-noprofile

By default, perlreview looks in several directores for a configuration file named .perlreviewrc. The -noprofile option tells perlreview not to load any configuration file, thus defaulting to its factory setup, which means that all the Policy modules that are distributed with Perl::Review will be loaded.

CONFIGURATION

The default configuration file is called .perlreviewrc and it lives in your home directory. If this file does not exist and the -profile option is not given to the constructor, perlreview defaults to its factory setup, which means that all the policies that are distributed with Perl::Review will be applied.

The format of the configuration file is a series of named sections that contain key-value pairs separated by ':' or '='. Comments should start with '#' and can be placed on a separate line or after the name-value pairing if you desire. The general recipe is a series of sections like this:

[PolicyModuleName]
priority = 1
arg1 = value1
arg2 = value2

The PolicyModuleName should be the name of module that implements the policy you want to use. The module should be a subclass of Perl::Review::Policy. For brevity, you can ommit the 'Perl::Review::Policy' part of the module name.

The priority should be the level of importance you wish to assign to the policy module. 1 is the highest priority level, and all numbers greater than 1 have increasingly lower priority. Only those policies with a priority less than or equal to the -priority value given on the command-line. The priority can be an arbitrarily large positive integer. If the priority is not defined, it defaults to 1.

The remaining key-value pairs are configuration parameters for that specific Policy and will be passed into the constructor of the Perl::Review::Policy subclass. The constructors for most Policy modules do not support arguments, and those that do should have reasonable defaults. See the documentation on the appropriate Policy module for more details.

By default, all the policies that are distributed with Perl::Review are applied. Rather than assign priority levels to each one, you can simply "turn off" a Policy by appending a '-' to the name of the module in the config file. In this manner, the Policy will never be applied, regardless of the -priority option given at the command-line.

A sample configuration might look like this:

#--------------------------------------------------------------
# These are really important, so always apply them

[RequirePackageStricture]
priority = 1

[RequirePackageWarnings]
priority = 1

#--------------------------------------------------------------
# These are less important, so only apply when asked

[ProhibitOneArgumentBless]
priority = 2

[ProhibitDoWhileLoops]
priority = 2

#--------------------------------------------------------------
# I don't agree with these, so never apply them

[-ProhibitMixedCaseVars]
[-ProhibitMixedCaseSubs]

THE POLICIES

The following Policy modules are distributed with Perl::Review. Policy modules have been categorized according to the table of contents in Damian Conway's book Perl Best Practices. Since most coding standards take the form "do this..." or "don't do that...", I have adopted the convention of naming each module RequireSomething or ProhibitSomething. See the documentation of each module for it's specific details.

Perl::Review::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitStringyEval

Perl::Review::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitStringyGrep

Perl::Review::Policy::BuiltinFunctions::ProhibitStringyMap

Perl::Review::Policy::CodeLayout::RequireTidyCode

Perl::Review::Policy::ControlStructures::ProhibitPostfixControls

Perl::Review::Policy::InputOutput::ProhibitBacktickOperators

Perl::Review::Policy::Modules::ProhibitMultiplePackages

Perl::Review::Policy::Modules::ProhibitRequireStatements

Perl::Review::Policy::Modules::ProhibitSpecificModules

Perl::Review::Policy::Modules::ProhibitUnpackagedCode

Perl::Review::Policy::NamingConventions::ProhibitMixedCaseSubs

Perl::Review::Policy::NamingConventions::ProhibitMixedCaseVars

Perl::Review::Policy::Subroutines::ProhibitSubroutinePrototypes

Perl::Review::Policy::TestingAndDebugging::RequirePackageStricture

Perl::Review::Policy::TestingAndDebugging::RequirePackageWarnings

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitConstantPragma

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitEmptyQuotes

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitInterpolationOfLiterals

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::ProhibitNoisyQuotes

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::RequireInterpolationOfMetachars

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::RequireQuotedHeredocTerminator

Perl::Review::Policy::ValuesAndExpressions::RequireUpperCaseHeredocTerminator

Perl::Review::Policy::Variables::ProhibitLocalVars

Perl::Review::Policy::Variables::ProhibitPackageVars

Perl::Review::Policy::Variables::ProhibitPunctuationVars

EDITOR INTEGRATION

For ease-of-use, perlreview can be integrated with your favorite editor. emacs users can put the following code in your .emacs configuration file:

(defun perlreview ()
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region (point) (mark) "perlreview"))

(global-set-key "\C-xpr" 'perlreview)

Pressing "Control-x p r" will run perlreview on the current region and the output will appear in a separate buffer. My E-Lisp skills are pretty weak, so I'd appreciate any tips for improvement on this. Also, vi fans are welcome to submit similar code and I'll publish it here.

BUGS

Scrutinizing Perl code is hard for humans, let alone machines. If you find any bugs, particularly false-positives or false-negatives from a Perl::Review::Policy, please submit them to http://rt.cpan.org. Thanks.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer <thaljef@cpan.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2005 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.