Module::Dependency Documentation
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Overview
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This is a suite of modules (and a set of helper programs that you may use 
if you wish) that allow you to investigate the dependencies between
perl programs and modules. This is primarily aimed at the programmer/
developer audience.

What are dependencies?
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When your foo.pl program says 'use CGI;' that program /depends/ upon 
CGI.pm - I'll refer to this as 'CGI is a child dependency of foo.pl',
and similarly 'foo.pl is a parent dependency of CGI'. These modules
work with all the parent and child dependencies between a collection
of perl files that you specify.

How does it work?
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Basically the first thing you do is create a database by feeding a list
of directories to Module::Dependency::Indexer::makeIndex()
These directories are recursively searched using File::Find to examine
all the .pl, .plx and .pm files. Parent and child dependencies are 
stored, as are a few other bits of information. One database is created
for all the files found in that run.

Making the database is quite expensive so the idea is to create the
database once, and use it many times. Typical values are 5-10 seconds to
index a reasonably large site_perl directory. You can create many 
different database files should you need to.

You use functions in Module::Dependency::Info to get information out
of the database.

You use functions in Module::Dependency::Grapher to visualize the links
between items. It can output in plain text, HTML fragment, PostScript,
Encapsulated PostScript or any format your copy of GD supports.

In using GD for output, the available output formats
depend upon your local copy of GD, but PNG should be available on all
installations. GIF and JPEG are also possible. This module can also
produce basic plain text output and HTML fragment output.

See the README.EXAMPLES file.

The Grapher output is fast enough to use in a CGI application, even with
a database containing many hundreds of items. It was written with the 
intention of going on an intranet software engineers support site. A
working CGI is included. See README.EXAMPLES.

Installation
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Read the INSTALL file.

More Information
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You can probably get started using the programs bundled with this 
package - see README.COMMANDS - so you don't have to write any code.

For more advanced or specialist usages you'll want to know how to use the
modules - see README.MODULES for that.

For examples see the README.EXAMPLES file.

Improvements
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Please tell me about any bugs you find, or any suggestions for
improvements.

pause@selsyn.co.uk (P Kent)

Copyright and License
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This software is copyright 2001-2002 P Kent.
This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
the same terms as Perl itself.