Earlier we have put some energy into eliminating indirect method calls, but as I started to read the source code again, I found there are lots of other places with indirect calls.

As I found out the Objects::ProhibitIndirectSyntax cannot handle them automatically. Perl::Critic::Policy::Dynamic::NoIndirect that looked like an alternative, failed to install and I am not sure that would do the work.

Instead, I went back to Objects::ProhibitIndirectSyntax that can be configured to look for specific words.

I could have written a new policy that would locate code that looks like those bareword Bare::Word param param If there are :: in the second bareword then this is probably an indirect call. But I did not want to shave that Yak.

Instead of that I started to look over the code looking for indirect calls. Whenever I found one, I would add it to the .perlcriticrc file to the [Objects::ProhibitIndirectSyntax] rule. I've also removed the severity = 5 entry from that rule as it is not needed any more now that the general severity level is 4.

I made two separate commits with these changes

commit

commit

From all the changes let me point out these two lines:

Before: 

           push @text, text Pod::Tree::Node $text if $text;
           push @link, ( text Pod::Tree::Node $link), @$children;

After: 

           push @text, Pod::Tree::Node->text($text) if $text;
           push @link, Pod::Tree::Node->text($link), @$children;

In the second line of the code before the change, the author had to use parentheses around the construct to make sure he text function receives only two parameters. This kind of disambiguation is not necessary with the direct method call where we put parentheses around the parameters, as expected by most programmers.