I am working on a project where I want to do some calculations on how much I actually work (scary stuff). So I want to the CPAN and found Time::Interval 1.0, which looked really usable.
I tried to install it via CPAN and it failed :-/
Apparently it required Date::Parse, but the Makefile.PL did not specify so:
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
WriteMakefile(
'NAME' => 'Time::Interval',
'VERSION_FROM' => 'Interval.pm',
'ABSTRACT_FROM' => 'Interval.pod',
'AUTHOR' => 'Andrew N. HIcox
Reading through the documentation I noticed that Date::Parse was mentioned quite a few times, so I suspected that this module WAS used by Time::Interval.
% find . -name "*.p?" | xargs egrep -n -e "require|use"
./Interval.pm:12:use strict;
./Interval.pm:13:require Exporter;
./Interval.pm:33: warn ("two dates are required for the getInterval method");
./Interval.pm:36: require Date::Parse;
./test.pl:8:use Test;
./test.pl:10:use Time::Interval;
And I was right, So I sent a mail to the author pointing out the obvius mistake of forgetting Date::Parse in the requirement list, the day after the module was updated to 1.0.1 with the fix and he even mentioned me and thanked me in the Changes file and I could see that the module also passed its test on CPAN-testers.
So little work and we both gained something :)
CPAN is so much more than a software repository and I can only recommend taking the time to help out other authors they might help you some day...
