Provided by: libstrictures-perl_1.005002-1_all 
NAME
strictures - turn on strict and make all warnings fatal
SYNOPSIS
use strictures 1;
is equivalent to
use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
except when called from a file which matches:
(caller)[1] =~ /^(?:t|xt|lib|blib)/
and when either ".git", ".svn", or ".hg" is present in the current directory (with the intention of only
forcing extra tests on the author side) -- or when ".git", ".svn", or ".hg" is present two directories up
along with "dist.ini" (which would indicate we are in a "dzil test" operation, via Dist::Zilla) -- or
when the "PERL_STRICTURES_EXTRA" environment variable is set, in which case
use strictures 1;
is equivalent to
use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
no indirect 'fatal';
no multidimensional;
no bareword::filehandles;
Note that "PERL_STRICTURES_EXTRA" may at some point add even more tests, with only a minor version
increase, but any changes to the effect of "use strictures" in normal mode will involve a major version
bump.
If any of the extra testing modules are not present, strictures will complain loudly, once, via "warn()",
and then shut up. But you really should consider installing them, they're all great anti-footgun tools.
DESCRIPTION
I've been writing the equivalent of this module at the top of my code for about a year now. I figured it
was time to make it shorter.
Things like the importer in "use Moose" don't help me because they turn warnings on but don't make them
fatal -- which from my point of view is useless because I want an exception to tell me my code isn't
warnings-clean.
Any time I see a warning from my code, that indicates a mistake.
Any time my code encounters a mistake, I want a crash -- not spew to STDERR and then unknown (and
probably undesired) subsequent behaviour.
I also want to ensure that obvious coding mistakes, like indirect object syntax (and not so obvious
mistakes that cause things to accidentally compile as such) get caught, but not at the cost of an XS
dependency and not at the cost of blowing things up on another machine.
Therefore, strictures turns on additional checking, but only when it thinks it's running in a test file
in a VCS checkout -- although if this causes undesired behaviour this can be overridden by setting the
"PERL_STRICTURES_EXTRA" environment variable.
If additional useful author side checks come to mind, I'll add them to the "PERL_STRICTURES_EXTRA" code
path only -- this will result in a minor version increase (e.g. 1.000000 to 1.001000 (1.1.0) or
similar). Any fixes only to the mechanism of this code will result in a sub-version increase (e.g.
1.000000 to 1.000001 (1.0.1)).
If the behaviour of "use strictures" in normal mode changes in any way, that will constitute a major
version increase -- and the code already checks when its version is tested to ensure that
use strictures 1;
will continue to only introduce the current set of strictures even if 2.0 is installed.
METHODS
import
This method does the setup work described above in "DESCRIPTION"
VERSION
This method traps the "strictures->VERSION(1)" call produced by a use line with a version number on it
and does the version check.
EXTRA TESTING RATIONALE
Every so often, somebody complains that they're deploying via "git pull" and that they don't want
strictures to enable itself in this case -- and that setting "PERL_STRICTURES_EXTRA" to 0 isn't
acceptable (additional ways to disable extra testing would be welcome but the discussion never seems to
get that far).
In order to allow us to skip a couple of stages and get straight to a productive conversation, here's my
current rationale for turning the extra testing on via a heuristic:
The extra testing is all stuff that only ever blows up at compile time; this is intentional. So the oft-
raised concern that it's different code being tested is only sort of the case -- none of the modules
involved affect the final optree to my knowledge, so the author gets some additional compile time crashes
which he/she then fixes, and the rest of the testing is completely valid for all environments.
The point of the extra testing -- especially "no indirect" -- is to catch mistakes that newbie users
won't even realise are mistakes without help. For example,
foo { ... };
where foo is an & prototyped sub that you forgot to import -- this is pernicious to track down since all
seems fine until it gets called and you get a crash. Worse still, you can fail to have imported it due to
a circular require, at which point you have a load order dependent bug which I've seen before now only
show up in production due to tiny differences between the production and the development environment. I
wrote <http://shadow.cat/blog/matt-s-trout/indirect-but-still-fatal/> to explain this particular problem
before strictures itself existed.
As such, in my experience so far strictures' extra testing has avoided production versus development
differences, not caused them.
Additionally, strictures' policy is very much "try and provide as much protection as possible for newbies
-- who won't think about whether there's an option to turn on or not" -- so having only the environment
variable is not sufficient to achieve that (I get to explain that you need to add "use strict" at least
once a week on freenode #perl -- newbies sometimes completely skip steps because they don't understand
that that step is important).
I make no claims that the heuristic is perfect -- it's already been evolved significantly over time,
especially for 1.004 where we changed things to ensure it only fires on files in your checkout (rather
than strictures-using modules you happened to have installed, which was just silly). However, I hope the
above clarifies why a heuristic approach is not only necessary but desirable from a point of view of
providing new users with as much safety as possible, and will allow any future discussion on the subject
to focus on "how do we minimise annoyance to people deploying from checkouts intentionally".
SEE ALSO
• indirect
• multidimensional
• bareword::filehandles
COMMUNITY AND SUPPORT
IRC channel
irc.perl.org #toolchain
(or bug 'mst' in query on there or freenode)
Git repository
Gitweb is on http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/ and the clone URL is:
git clone git://git.shadowcat.co.uk/p5sagit/strictures.git
The web interface to the repository is at:
http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=p5sagit/strictures.git
AUTHOR
mst - Matt S. Trout (cpan:MSTROUT) <mst@shadowcat.co.uk>
CONTRIBUTORS
Karen Etheridge (cpan:ETHER) <ether@cpan.org>
Mithaldu - Christian Walde (cpan:MITHALDU) <walde.christian@gmail.com>
haarg - Graham Knop (cpan:HAARG) <haarg@haarg.org>
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2010 the strictures "AUTHOR" and "CONTRIBUTORS" as listed above.
LICENSE
This library is free software and may be distributed under the same terms as perl itself.
perl v5.18.1 2013-12-11 strictures(3pm)