Minimalist Online Docmentation

When implementing these items or considering new ones, remember that it's more important for this program to be simple than powerful.

This to-do list isn't as detailed as the one in the source directory. Many of the items are pretty large in scope, and will probably be addressed in a future development branch.

Still to do

• add a dry run option "-n" that only shows what would happen, but makes no changes.

• should be using split() instead of regular expressions to parse the config file and status files.

• Portability issues: much of the path handling code could probably be more cleanly and portably handled by the functions of File::Basename and File::Spec. Just do a search in the source for "/"...

• Perhaps File::Checktree::validate() could be of use for complex existence/permission checks? My only question is that there's no mention of its portability in the man pages...

• build_tree()'s find() probably shouldn't look descend the .mod/ tree.

• improve name_cmp so that it correctly handles numbers, e.g.:
  • 10._conclusion vs 1._introduction
  • 4.3.5.2_subsubsubtopic vs. 4.3_larger_issue

• decide what to do about mingled vs. unmingled folders.

• decide what to do about =this_folder_first/last. perhaps rename =me_first/last as a result (or becuase it's a better name anyway).

• finish confirming/modifying all other past name decisions. Now's the time for changes.

• first pass should warn about any "almost" tags (unrecognized keyword, space before, ...)

• improve documentation for config file variables -- the description of what format these should be in is not clear.

Wish list

• A rewrite would be great. The design of mod was very evolutionary, and it shows. Not a great method for a complex procedural language. Our own tree class would really pay off.

• Compatibility with POD files.

• A lot of the functionality of this program would be more naturally implemented by writing my own node code rather than using Tree::DAG_Node. This would almost certainly offer some performance improvement as well.

  I didn't take this tack at first due to time and learning curve restraints. Cleanly separating html-independent code into a Tree::MOD module would also lend itself nicely to other "mod2*" scripts down the road. This would probably be version 2.

• There's no reason why this can't be portable across OS's. Should make sure it's supported just about everywhere.

• I'm sure that there's a place for style sheets in MOD. Right now I know very little about them, but I'd like to make sure that they're seriously considered.