chromatic wrote: >> This is a specific sort of failure, and as far as I'm concerned it is an >> improperly configured machine. I'm not going to include a redundant >> Makefile.PL just to support people who don't upgrade their tools. It's >> no different than not supporting perl 5.005.
I believe Eric is referring to CPANPLUS' behavior wrt Build.PL without a Makefile.PL. It fails the install and tells the user to install Module::Build and CPANPLUS::Dist::MB. CPAN.pm just asks if it should install MB first and proceeds normally. > Normally I'm all for that, but the core installation toolchain is a bit > different from other prerequisites. I don't expect that a novice installing > Perl modules for the first time is going to find the "Oh, but first install > Module::Build" instructions particularly clear, especially as he or she might > not encounter that instruction in a particularly clear way. This isn't a problem that worries me terribly because it's an O(1) problem across all CPAN modules. Once you figure out what to do with a Build.PL you've figured out all the Build.PLs. The error message from running the Build.PL is also O(1). "Can't locate Foo/Bar.pm in @INC", just like any other missing dependency, is something they're likely to have encountered before with other modules and will encounter in the future. What could improve things is a better generated README for Module::Build. Rather than simply copying the documentation it should include dependency and installation instructions. These are simple enough to auto-generate. Many moons ago I wrote mod2readme to do just that. It needs a lot of dusting but it tries to write an INSTALL document which gives the installation mantra as well as any prerequisite modules and external tools (such as a C compiler) that might be needed. http://schwern.org/~schwern/src/mod2readme -- Insulting our readers is part of our business model. http://somethingpositive.net/sp07122005.shtml
