Removing CPAN's dependency on Test::More

[Ken Williams]

Hi,

Twice recently, I've just been through the task of upgrading CPAN.pm from 1.59_54 to 1.63 on a solaris system because something about MD5 was broken enough that no modules could be installed. It took a long time to do manually, because of the dependency on Test::More, which depends on Test::Harness, and because I didn't immediately know to look for Test::More in Test::Simple.

So why does CPAN.pm depend on Test::More anyway? It only uses it during its 'make test' phase, not during runtime operations. And when you can't install modules very easily because you don't have CPAN.pm working properly, it's, well, not very easy to install other modules. ;-)

Seems like one of the following would be better:

1) Include a copy of Test::More and Test::Harness in a t/lib/ directory and use that

2) Rework the two Test::More-using tests (mirroredby.t and Nox.t) to just use Test.pm

Or is this a sneaky way to get more people to install Test::More on their machines?

-Ken