Class::Sniff for the Win!

Ovid on 2009-02-06T15:53:33

I always find out interesting stuff at London.pm meetings. Last night's involved me learning about someone who found unexpected problems in his code using Class::Sniff (not naming him because I didn't ask permission). This makes me happy.

There was also a general discussion of its features and here are some thoughts (some I've had, others came up last night):

• Calling SUPER:: with MI should definitely be a code smell (perhaps an outright bug?) and not too hard to detect. I'm wondering how else this might manifest. It has some odd edge cases, though.
• Allow Class::Sniff->new({ class => $some_instance }). I know it's trivial, but I get tired of typing 'ref' because I'm usually loading an instance first to ensure everything is loaded properly.
• Get rid of the Tree. I don't think I need it.
• $sniff->report({ as => 'html' });
• Can I merge different sniff graphs to get a fully graphed system?
• Find a clean way of excluding stuff you don't care about without excluding an entire section of the report.