# 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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