I'm disinclined to back this change out. See the bug for reasoning.
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=14936
To sum up:
* There was ample warning.
* You shouldn't be relying on screen scraping.
* The fix to Test::Builder::Tester is trivial.
* Rolling back the change is a pain in my ass.
The bug for this in Test::Builder::Tester is here:
http://rt.cpan.org/NoAuth/Bug.html?id=14931
Normally I'd completely agree.
But in this case regardless of whether it was right or wrong to do so,
it has worked just fine for people for over 3 years and at this point
1/3rd of CPAN gets caught in the dependency chain, so it means
practically every single Perl install is deemed "broken".
Whereas with the backout we only have 10 days worth of upgraders who are
considered "broken".
If we start with everything broken and try to gradually fix it, we're
going to have little errors here and there for a long time.
If we can back the change out for 6 months or so, there's time to get
all the potential scrapers audited for problems, add anything else they
need to work properly, update the dependencies on the 26 modules that
use it, and then put the change back in again.
But in the mean time, while we are fixing it, everything will still work
and people will still be able to install modules. Which they can't do
now without either forcing all the installs that fail, or manually
installing an old version of Test-Simple.
At the present time you cannot install anything of consequence onto a
fresh Perl install.
One of the first dependencies to install is Test-Simple, which will
work, followed by Test::Buidler::Tester (since almost everything needs
it), which will fail.
Adam K
