All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Module::Pluggable vs. Emacs

ChrisDolan on 2007-02-14T21:49:27

So, I'm working on my Catalyst app and editing one of my controllers. I restart apache (app runs under mod_perl) and get a useless error message

Warning: Use of "require" without parentheses is ambiguous at (eval 357) line 1.
syntax error at (eval 357) line 2, at EOF
Compilation failed in require at /Users/chris/perl/lib/perl5/site_perl/Catalyst/Test.pm line 79.


Grr, I hate those. Something is dynamically loading a module that it doesn't like, but it's happening down in an eval{} so the error is obscured. So, I pop in a line: 
use Carp; $SIG{__DIE__} = \&Carp::confess;


and discover that the file that's failing is ".#Home.pm". Module::Pluggable has picked up an auto-save file that Emacs put down because I forgot to save a buffer before restarting. So, the fix is simply "C-x C-s".

After a day of fighting with Catalyst under FastCGI vs. mod_perl, I had to just laugh at this absurd failure.

But then I started thinking: how smart should Module::Pluggable be about special cases like that? Is this worth a bug report? Vi users don't have to suffer this because Module::Pluggable won't pick up the .swp files.

I call it a bug

dagolden on 2007-02-14T22:18:42

Since Foo::.#Home.pm is not a valid module name, I don't think Module::Pluggable should be loading it. It's not a difficult thing to check. I'd file the bug report.

Re:I call it a bug

Alias on 2007-02-15T03:06:13

I concur.

I'd expect Module::Pluggable to skip at the very least hidden files) but checking that the file name matches a legitimate module naming pattern works as well.

Re:I call it a bug

Dom2 on 2007-02-15T12:18:01

In fact, it works better, as it's a whitelist rather than a blacklist. So it won't have to be updated in the future. For example, I'd bet that you also want to ignore @._*@ (OS X droppings).

Re:I call it a bug

muttley on 2007-02-15T21:03:06

Hmm, I thought I was skipping non valid files.

I'll have a check and see what's going on.

Re:I call it a bug

ChrisDolan on 2007-02-15T21:37:03

I think this line is at fault:

  next unless $plugin =~ m!(?:[a-z\d]+)[a-z\d]!i;
It should probably be something like:

  next unless $plugin =~ m!\A [a-z]\w* (?: ::[a-z]\w* )* \z!ix;
Does Perl allow Unicode in module names? I though not, but if so [a-z] is too restrictive