All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

miracle by mail

ethan on 2003-08-30T21:10:42

Just received this email:

Subject: Other platforms

I'm trying to compile it on macos x 10.1.5. do you know about any problems that could occur?

yours xxxx

with 'xxxx' being the placeholder for the name of the author.

Two things worthy mention: What does he try to compile? He must be referring to one of my Perl modules...good, only three candidates that require C compilation left. Secondly, he seems to ask whether I can anticipate any problems I. Why doesn't he just try? Compilers tend to be faster than me responding to emails.

I wonder what people with really many CPAN distributions (like Simon for instance) have to suffer when all user-requests are like that. Poor chaps.

Mailing lists

autarch on 2003-08-30T22:16:55

Fortunately, the modules that get the most questions have mailing lists. If I had to answer all the Mason questions personally, I'd go nuts. Fortunately, a lot of other people answer things, which leaves me free for the weirder problems that only a few people (Jon Swartz, Ken Williams, and I mostly) can deal with.

My favourite emails

grantm on 2003-08-31T01:06:09

The ones I really 'love' go something like this:

I've heard great things about your module 'X' but Perl is a really complicated language that I don't grok. Had you considered rewriting 'X' in 'V'?

Re:My favourite emails

runrig on 2003-09-06T14:25:11

One of my favourites was a guy who copied and pasted from the SYNOPSIS section and then asked why it didn't work...(umm, none of those variables in the argument lists are set to anything yet)...