TL;DR

There are a couple new options in App::Easer.

I worked on a small application to retrieve data from a few sources and merge them together to provide a unified view and possibly spot issues of synchronization. I called this application quis (which is latin for who, usually in a question - you can imagine what the application does).

I want the application to provide sub-commands for different specific tasks (e.g. logging in/out of different systems, etc.), although most of the times I use one specific subcommand that does the retrieval-and-merging operation (this is sub-command all). This means that a typical session would be something like this:

$ quis login

# repeated many times...
$ quis all foo.bar           # identifier type #1
$ quis all baz.galook        # ditto
$ quis all 12389             # identifier type #2
$ quis all ABCDEF80A01P023K  # identifier type #3
# you get the idea... 

$ quis logout

All those all allegedly allow bore to rise (allegorically), so I want something like this instead:

$ quis login

# repeated many times...
$ quis foo.bar           # identifier type #1
$ quis baz.galook        # ditto
$ quis 12389             # identifier type #2
$ quis ABCDEF80A01P023K  # identifier type #3
# you get the idea... 

$ quis logout

This sort of reminds me of Natural Language Principles in Perl, for two reasons:

• Local ambiguity is OK and
• it’s a terrific opportunity to bookmark that page that is so inspirational and always so hard for me to find on the internet. (I’ll also write baby perl just for easier retrieval at some future time).

App::Easer up to version 0.006 does not allow this, because it will try to match the first word against the list of possible children for the top level MAIN (implicit) command, and fail with all the identifiers.

Version 0.007-TRIAL, though, gives us fallback and its siblings fallback-to and fallback-to-default.

So we can set this structure:

my $app = {
    commands => {
        MAIN => {
            children => [qw< all login logout >], # as before
            'fallback-to' => 'all',   # LOOK AT THIS, MA'!
            ...
        },
        all => {...},
        login => {...},
        logout => {...},
        ...
    },
    ...
}

and just expect it to work, delegating to sub-command all whatever command-line that cannot be resolved properly into a sub-command.

Stay safe people!