# 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" --------------------------------------------------- http://scratchcomputing.com ---------------------------------------------------