Exporter-Simple

Revision history for Perl extension Exporter::Simple.

1.10 Thu Nov 21 17:00:15 CET 2002

Another almost-TOTAL rewrite. Version 1.00 was beautiful, but didn't quite do what we wanted. Slaven Rezic pointed out that it was still necessary to declare our() vars in packages that imported from a module that used Exporter::Simple and asked if this requirement could be removed. The solution turned out to be somewhat involved (read the source for details). Basically the problem was that we exported everything during INIT, but perl complains if it doesn't find a variable in a package's symbol table during BEGIN. That's why the our() declaration was still necessary. Now I've reworked things so that scalars, arrays and hashes get exported during BEGIN, but subroutines get exported during INIT. It's not that simple though; read the source to find out what kinds of hoops I had to jump through.

1.00 Sat Aug 31 18:38:27 CEST 2002

TOTAL rewrite. Now that perl 5.8.0 is out, we have attributes on 'our' variables. This means we don't have to clumsily export globals, nor do we need to export lexicals (which was a weird concept anyway). So there's no need for Filter::Simple and PadWalker or any of the ugly workarounds that introduced. And once it occurred to me that Exporter::Simple could just subclass Exporter, and modules wanting to use Exporter::Simple could subclass it, things were a lot easier. Now using the attributes will populate the exporting package's @EXPORT, @EXPORT_OK and %EXPORT_TAGS direcltly, and we let Exporter have its way (with a few slight modifications).
It's beautiful. And more proof of the old adage "if it's too complicated, there's probably something wrong with it" - when it's right, it's rather simple and elegant and things easily fall into place.

0.13 Fri Mar 15 22:42:16 CET 2002

Incorporated two patches sent by Richard Clamp in response to bug reports by Mark Fowler (thanks guys). First, Makefile.PL now contains Filter::Simple in its PREREQ_PM, and it builds with a newer Attribute::Handler and Filter::Simple, which mess around with our import() sub.

0.12 Tue Jul 3 13:07:30 CEST 2001

Changed source filter to insert lexical-inspecting code at the end of the calling module
Added documentation effectively saying 'our attributes will be in 5.8.0, so we're not doing any fancy workarounds here'

0.11 Thu Jun 7 14:00:35 2001

Added source filter to rename custom import() routine, so no special name is necessary

0.10 Tue Jun 6 18:37:20 2001

Added exportable lexicals and support for a custom _import routine. Also export() and exportable() to manually export globals (as they can't take attributes).

0.02 Wed May 30 13:53:50 2001

Added tests, documentation. Renamed 'Export' to 'Exported' and 'ExportOk' to 'Exportable' (Damian's idea)

0.01 Wed May 23 12:57:49 2001