rjbs' introduction to Dist-Zilla piqued my interest, and I used CPANPLUS-Dist-Mdv to prepare .rpm's for it and its depenedencies and install them. However, I wondered about a potential problem with it, before I even tried it, and speaking with rjbs on IRC confirmed that it exists.
Dist-Zilla generates the resulting .pm, scripts, etc. from templates, and as a result the lines that are reported by errors and warnings are not the same as the ones you've edited. This makes tracing lines back to their source much more difficult. Since most of my times is spent debugging and handling errors (whether I encounter them or I find them on CPAN testers or in bug reports), and I want to edit the source directly, I think that Dist-Zilla is not for me. What instead I'd like is a way to change common, repeated text (like version numbers, licensing, URLs, etc.) commonly across all the files in a certain distribution, or in many distributions. That and also that module-starter (or whatever) provide scaffolding for creating a new .pm file.
I appreciate rjbs's efforts, but I'm going to stick with module-starter (and contribute to it).
First off, please use whatever you like. Nearly all the code I release is stuff that I wrote for myself and released for others to enjoy.
That said, you are conflating Dist::Zilla with its plugins. It is entirely possible, and quite easy, to not use any plugins that will alter your code. It would be easy, too, to keep much or all of the POD munging without altering source line numbers by keeping all your POD in the __END__.
In fact, that's about all you'd need to do. If all your POD is at the end of your file, probably no line numbers will be altered.
It's Just Plugins™! You can pick which ones you like, or write your own.
ppi_version change 0.12 0.13
