All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

More annoying module authors

drhyde on 2007-09-08T19:37:08

So I reported a problem to an author, and even diagnosed it for him cos I'm such a nice guy, saying that "In the pre-requisites you list the 'B' and 'O' modules. But those don't exist seperately on the CPAN, only as part of perl itself, so don't need to be listed. In fact, listing them can confuse some build tools and if the user has a very old version of CPAN.pm it might even try to build a new perl for them."

He replied "Well, honestly I think that you need to improve those build tools; or otherwise cite some docs saying that it is illegal to list the modules in PREREQ_PM which are part of perl."

I wonder which part of "a very old version of CPAN.pm" - that is, it doesn't apply to the current version - he is too stupid to understand, and why he thinks that other peoples' bugs are my problem.

Howto handle prerequisites that are in core

LaPerla on 2007-09-09T05:54:31

But a prerequisite is a prerequisite independently of the fact if they are included in core. I usually encourage people to explicitely list their core module dependencies because there may always be perl installations that miss them. Either somebody used the -Dnoextensions option at Configure time or they have a minidistro or they have a broken installation, there are reasons why they might miss a core prerequisite.

B and O are ok

Alias on 2007-09-09T23:07:28

It's totally fine to list those modules.

It is the responsibility of the CPAN client to control dependency fulfillment, it that asks to upgrade Perl, that's generally a fairly obvious failure, and will result in the CPAN client being upgraded by the user in most cases.

Re:B and O are ok

drhyde on 2007-09-10T16:53:21

My experience is that when CPAN.pm tries to upgrade perl while a sysadmin is installing some obscure module just so he can write a small script, people say "oh, perl's a buggy piece of shit, I'll use something else". B and O have been in the core since 5.005. If he really does care about 5.004 users, then he's in for Interesting Times, as 5.004's CPAN.pm will indeed try to upgrade perl when it finds that dependency.

In any case, his saying that I need to fix CPAN.pm (when it's already been fixed, and presumably I should also magically deploy the fix to everyone who has an old version of it) really is a bit silly.

It stuff's repacking too

TeeJay on 2007-09-10T08:12:42

I've wasted a fair ammount of time debianizing distributions that include some random library that is part of CORE.