--- David Cantrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Eric Wilhelm wrote: > > # from Adam Kennedy > >> Thus, I would like to propose the following. > >> 1. That the running of POD-related tests by end users is > considered > >> harmful. > > +20 > > -40 > > I don't see that it's harmful at all. It's not even particularly > harmful (merely annoying) for an author to add Test::Pod etc as > pre-requisites. And if you have a religious objection to installing > them, you can always run the rest of the tests for a module, see that > it passes all the functional tests, and force install it.
Nope. Adam's right. Anything which causes the build to fail for unnecessary reasons is bad. Very bad. Every time we say "oh, we'll just allow one more tiny thing", we soon get a steaming pile of tiny things (core modules shipped with perl are exhibit A). I've been guilty of missing this point in the past and I'd like to avoid it in the future. As a result, I've often forced users to install Test::Differences when really Test::More::is_deeply is a suitable fallback. Test::Differences merely gives me, the author, better diagnostics. What it gives the end user is another point of failure. Multiply those points of failure by the number of end users and the number of systems they might install the code on and you begin to get an idea of the magnitude of the problem. Tests should *only* fail when there is a clear, unequivocal reason to believe that the code will not function appropriately on someone's machine. Having '=head0' or a '=back' without '=over' should not be such a failure. It's taken a lot of grief while working on TAP::Parser to realize how terribly wrong I was about this in the past and it's a mistake I would like to better understand and rectify in the future. Cheers, Ovid -- Buy the book - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/ Perl and CGI - http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/ Personal blog - http://publius-ovidius.livejournal.com/ Tech blog - http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/
