TL;DR

Where I opened a documentation pull request towards Perl module SVG.

I was looking for a module to deal with SVG files in CPAN and I obviously stumbled upon SVG.

Although I was looking for a module to read SVG files, I was actually lucky to land on SVG because it pointed to SVG::Parser anyway, and this latter module actually produced a SVG object instance (so I have to deal with SVG anyway).

To be honest, I first opened the page for SVG::DOM, where I found this example:

my $svg=new SVG(id=>"svg_dom_synopsis", width=>"100", height=>"100");
...

This started itching a bit, because the Indirect Object Syntax “is discouraged as it can confuse the Perl interpreter” and, as a matter of fact, version 5.32 of Perl (here the release notes) introduced a new option for module feature to explicitly disable it and ease the parser’s life (it is called indirect, of course).

Then I moved to the main documentation for SVG, and found this:

See the other modules in this distribution: SVG::DOM, SVG::XML, SVG::Element,
SVG::Parser, SVG::Extension

But… SVG::Parser is no more a module in this distribution, it lives in its own. I’m starting to feel a urge to scratch…

Last, this module comes from a time when there was a company providing commercial support for SVG with Perl (maybe more than one). I don’t know what happened to these companies (I hope the best!), but those links don’t work any more. This itch is unbearable now!

It’s like you are in a beatiful garden and you see a few bits of litter around. Nobody left them there on purpose: you can see it’s been the joint work of time and some wind. Cleaning up a bit seems the right thing to do, doesn’t it?

So… inspired by MANWAR the Mighty Pull Requester (who is also the latest person to have released the SVG module, by the way), I resolved to propose a pull request - I hope I didn’t miss anything 😅