1 * DESCRIPTION (-*- org -*-)
2 Sepia is a set of features to make Emacs a better tool for Perl
3 development, including:
5 * an interactive prompt (REPL) for evaluating code;
6 * cross-referencing to find and navigate between function and
7 variable definitions and uses;
8 * variable- and function-name completion.
9 * eldoc support to echo function arguments in the minibuffer
10 * functions to simplify POD browsing with Emacs-w3m
12 Please see the Sepia.html or sepia.info for documentation.
14 The basic installation procedure is:
16 1) run "perl Makefile.PL; make; make install"
17 2) optionally, install w3m and Emacs-w3m
18 3) put the elisp files somewhere Emacs will find them.
20 Sepia is developed on the latest version of GNU Emacs, which can be
21 obtained from CVS or as a prebuilt package on some platforms. It can
22 run on other versions of Emacs, but may require additional packages.
23 ** Requirements for GNU Emacs 22
24 *** (optional) emacs-w3m from http://emacs-w3m.namazu.org/
25 *** (optional) w3m from http://w3m.sourceforge.net/
26 *** (optional) snippet.el from http://www.kazmier.com/computer/snippet.el
27 ** Additional requirements GNU Emacs 21
29 http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/emacs/lisp/ido.el?root=emacs
30 *** FreeBSD may require the following packages:
31 tree-widget-emacs21-2.0
32 emacs-w3m-emacs21-1.4.4_2
33 mule-ucs-emacs21-0.85.r3
43 The "official" source code repository mirror is at
45 http://repo.or.cz/w/sepia.git
47 To get a copy, install Git, then
49 git clone git://repo.or.cz/sepia.git
51 To submit a patch, please send a diff to the author, including an
52 Emacs-style ChangeLog entry.
54 ** (Medium) Get the variable def/use analysis working again.
55 ** (Medium) Let sepia-next go backward
56 Need to use a vector plus current index instead of a list for
58 ** (Hard) return from anything in the debugger
59 Make it possible to return from intermediate calls in the debugger.
60 Returning from die() is not often useful.
62 This can be done with a clever DB::sub, but that dramatically slows
64 ** (Medium) fix `sepia-beginning-of-defun' and `sepia-end-of-defun'.
65 While they work for "normal" sub definitions, they fail on
66 definitions that are all on one line, e.g.
72 ** (Medium) Fix string escaping when passing between Perl and Emacs
73 IO::Scalar's README tickles a bug.
74 ** (Hard) Make the debugger's "next" work
75 "next" (as opposed to "step") assumes that the next statement after
76 line $n is line $n+1, which isn't true for loops, blank lines,
77 multi-line statements, etc. Fix this somehow. One way might be to
78 temporary regain control on a op_next/op_nextstate, or whatever
79 those are called, but this would be hard and/or require XS.
80 ** (Medium) Make "finish" more reliable
81 It currently assumes that the last breakable statement in a sub is
82 one line before its end. The "right" solution would be like above:
83 to hook op_leave temporarily. This would similarly require XS
85 ** (Medium) Enable partial-word completion of lexicals
86 ** (Hard) Rewrite completion code, which is pretty ugly now.
87 This wouldn't seem "hard" but, having hacked on two completion
88 codebases (Sepia's and complete.el's), I know there are always a
89 lot of subtle cases to get right, and what acts "naturally" by
90 human standards is extremely complicated to specify in code.
91 ** (Hard) Add appropriate hooks
92 Possibly update existing functions to make use of hooks for better
95 The following is a list of bugs that are difficult to automatically
96 reproduce, with the dates they were first observed.
97 ** (2006-05-19) Function definition lines occasionally all go wrong.
98 Rebuilding the Xref database fixes this.
99 ** (2006-05-19) The cursor misses by several lines jumping to a definition.
100 This is hard to fix -- Perl doesn't give exact line numbers for sub
101 defs, so we have to do some minor regex-searching.
102 ** (2006-05-19) `sepia-var-assigns' doesn't work yet -- don't use it.
103 ** (2006-05-19) named method calls (mostly?) detected, but naively.
104 Nothing smart is done about packages, so e.g. "new Foo" will result
105 in listings for every instance of "new" in your program.
106 ** (2008-01-18) the first value printed in the debugger is undef. why?!
107 ** (2009-12-13) completion deletes things it shouldn't
108 e.g. $x->method => method. I need to rewrite this code to not suck.
109 * COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE
110 Copyright (C) 2004-2010 Sean O'Rourke
112 This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
113 it under the same terms as Perl itself, at the time at which this
114 version of Sepia was released.