NAME

Perl::Critic::Policy::Modules::RequireBarewordIncludes - Write "require Module" instead of "require 'Module.pm'".

AFFILIATION

This Policy is part of the core Perl::Critic distribution.

DESCRIPTION

When including another module (or library) via the "require" or "use" statements, it is best to identify the module (or library) using a bareword rather than an explicit path. This is because paths are usually not portable from one machine to another. Also, Perl automatically assumes that the filename ends in '.pm' when the library is expressed as a bareword. So as a side-effect, this Policy encourages people to write '*.pm' modules instead of the old-school '*.pl' libraries.

    use 'My/Perl/Module.pm';  #not ok
    use My::Perl::Module;     #ok

CONFIGURATION

This Policy is not configurable except for the standard options.

NOTES

This Policy is a replacement for "ProhibitRequireStatements", which completely banned the use of "require" for the sake of eliminating the old '*.pl' libraries from Perl4. Upon further consideration, I realized that "require" is quite useful and necessary to enable run-time loading. Thus, "RequireBarewordIncludes" does allow you to use "require", but still encourages you to write '*.pm' modules.

Sometimes, you may want to load modules at run-time, but you don't know at design-time exactly which module you will need to load (Perl::Critic is an example of this). In that case, just attach the '## no critic' annotation like so:

    require $module_name;  ## no critic

CREDITS

Chris Dolan <cdolan@cpan.org> was instrumental in identifying the correct motivation for and behavior of this Policy. Thanks Chris.

AUTHOR

Jeffrey Ryan Thalhammer <jeff@imaginative-software.com>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2005-2011 Imaginative Software Systems. All rights reserved.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. The full text of this license can be found in the LICENSE file included with this module.