Two things that CPAN authors should check when creating perl modules :
- When you use modules in your test harness - for christs sake put them in prerequisites in your Makefile.PL. By the time I get through your many many tests that CPAN will run before installing your module my connection has dropped and repeated running make test and installing the required modules one by one is annoying - after all if you forgot to put the modules you test with in your pre-requisites what else do I need to download seperately.
- When you use h2xs - think, do I really need to use our and warnings or 'require 5.8.1.7-bleeding-edge'. Is there a good reason for forcing users to upgrade by hand to whatever perl version I choose to use or am I too lazy to edit the Makefile created by h2xs or write code that is backwards compatible.
gah! some of us are still on dial up connections and don't have the time or money to do a apt-get dist upgrade just to use your module.
note to self - check all modules in the TEEJAY directory build just fine on bare-bones perl 5.5
On your second point ...
rob_au on 2003-06-10T23:09:37
When you use h2xs - think, do I really need to use our and warnings or 'require 5.8.1.7-bleeding-edge'. Is there a good reason for forcing users to upgrade by hand to whatever perl version I choose to use or am I too lazy to edit the Makefile created by h2xs or write code that is backwards compatible.
I cannot say that I agree more wholeheartedly - I ran into this problem with PDF::API2 qhich I was able to address with ten minutes worth of changes. This false dependency had prevented my place of work from deploying an open-source solution employing PDF::API2 for more than three months. I wrote about this in my journal previously and received a number of interesting replies there which may be of interest to you also.
cracking the CPAN whip
simonflk on 2003-06-10T23:13:52
When you use modules in your test harness - for christs sake put them in prerequisites in your Makefile.PL.
...unless it's not a requisite - in which case the tests should skip appropriately.
