JUANMARCOSMOREN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >>You make a good point about global variables, however I felt it was >>overridden by the importance of usable error reporting. The global $! >>for error messages is rather ugly, but still any good beginner's Perl >>tutorial recommends to always put $! in every error message. > >DO NOT USE GLOBALS!!! >If a tutorial tells you to use a global variable then that's a bad >tutorial!
Seriously? What do you use to report the failure of an open() call? >>It looks like there is a niche for a library that makes it simple to >>download URLs, but also makes it simple to do the right thing, which >>in my opinion means always checking the success of each call and >>giving an informative error message. > >As I said there's a "complicated" interface you should be using >anyway, instead the crappy LWP::Simple. I don't agree that LWP::Simple is crappy, I think it is a good library except for the inability to do error reporting. Anyway I am using the 'complicated' interface as you suggest. The modified LWP::Simple code is a thin wrapper around LWP to do what I want - fetch a URL, and report success or failure. I am not that keen on global variables, I would much prefer for an interface to throw an exception on error. This also makes a lot of code simpler since you no longer have to explicitly check return status - instead, you have to explicitly ignore or catch errors if you want to do that. The patch with the global $LWP::Simple::err was only because I thought it stood a better chance of getting accepted that way. -- Ed Avis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
