# from Andreas J. Koenig
# on Friday 09 March 2007 01:31 am:
>Thanks for the summary. I must apologize, this answer is going to
>sound a bit violent and rude.
Uh, this is the internet. No need to apologize for being
opinionated :-D
>Only a completely broken design can make it necessary that we need
>*two* environment variables to decide if a user wants to answer
>questions or wants the defaults to be taken.
We could do the same thing with one variable because it has true, false,
and "does not exist" states. ;-) That was my first thought, and would
be more perlish, but I'm inclined to think more people would scream
"baby killer" if I had suggested that instead.
>Goodness! <sarcasm>What about adding a mandatory dialog that asks the
>user if he has read the manual. And when he answers no, we quit
>immediately and shutdown the computer before he enters a wrong
>command.</sarcasm>
<playing along>Ironically, the prompt would hang, so the user would
probably shutdown anyway.</playing along>
Seriously, I share your sentiment. But...
1. `perl Build.PL` is not a unix command.
2. `perl Build.PL` may well be the first time the user has ever
typed `perl $anything` at a console.
3. It's perfectly reasonable to tell a programmer to go RTFM.
So, considering that being "unixy" in the context of (2) contributes to
the "I can never manage to install anything that's written in perl"
which I often hear (even from the likes of C++ programmers), I think we
would be better off thinking of it from that point of view.
If Module::Build is about making perl programs easier to install in more
places, I don't think having Build.PL behave with the manners of
find/grep/rm is the way to achieve that. Weigh the effort of trying to
walk somebody through a Build.PL via irc/whatever (e.g. author: "Send
me the output of perl Build.PL > log.txt", user: "That just sits and
stares at me", author: "ah, right. bah. I meant perl Build.PL >
log.txt < /dev/null") vs having to (gasp!) set a variable when building
a batch job.
--Eric
--
"Insert random misquote here"
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