Curl.xs is contained in the distribution directory, see here. You should find it when you unpack the distribution tarball.

I'm sure that if you review your SLA you have with the module author that you will find there the terms for approriate inclusion of patches. Most likely, you will also find there where and how to reach the authors hotline where you get support appropriate to your level of SLA.

Maybe you're unaware that most of CPANs authors work on a voluntary basis and don't get paid, so your expectation that some fix be released within some specified frame of time seems a bit unreasonable. Usually, authors are receptive to some kind words though, so maybe you can ask the author how you could help them, or submit the changes as described in prose in the ticket as a pull request.

OK, so I'd have to download the tarball from cpan.org, rather than using cpan / apt-get to install them? That's something I don't think I've tried before, but I think I can give it a go when I get home.

I think I'm a half-way decent coder, but I know very little about the internals or development of perl itself. I certainly don't have any idea if I have an SLA with module authors, let alone where it is or what it might say. I don't feel that I'm competent to patch the source code, and am only prepared to try this because it seems very simple. I certainly don't know how I would go about submitting a pull request. And I don't think those should be requirements for installing a module.

I don't feel unjustified in being frustrated that I've spent hours banging my head against a brick wall, when seems to be something that the maintainer could have fixed relatively quickly in the last six months. I'm not suggesting that all bugs need to be fixed within a week or anything like that, but if you have a major issue that literally stops the module from being installed, and it seems to be a relatively simple fix, and they can't find the time to deal with that within six months, then perhaps it needs to be considered abandoned and someone else take over. Perhaps that is unreasonable, I didn't get a lot of sleep last night, and my mood isn't the best. I'm trying to be fair, and I beg your indulgence if it's not coming off that way; I'm sure I'll be less short tomorrow.

And before someone suggests it, no I'm not volunteering. I don't have the skills or the understanding or the talent to even begin to take on such a project.

Do as I did here:

cpanm --look Net::Curl::Easy
[download]

It will download the module to a temporary directory, then drop you into a shell. You can make your changes then install with:

cpanm -v .
[download]

Note that the -v is simply the verbose flag, so it prints to screen what it's doing.

If you're going to build things from source it's pretty much essential that you check for open bugs. Your OS package management may already have this module bundled up for you. With respect it's unreasonable to expect this module to be abandoned, and while I understand that you're frustrated/tired/grumpy, not everyone will encounter this problem. Your OS upgrade may have changed the compiler/build tools. For me this module installs via cpanm without issue. So don't be angry that you've spent a long time trying to get this working. Embrace the fact that you know how to deal with the situation and in future that you will check the open issues for such things when building from source.

Curl.xs is in the root directory of the distribution:

marto:~$ cpanm --look Net::Curl::Easy
<cpanm does stuff here....>
marto:~/.cpanm/work/1492695425.31742/Net-Curl-0.37$ ls -al Curl.xs
-rw-r--r-- 1 marto marto 12240 Feb  1  2015 Curl.xs
[download]