No, it's not "sweetness and light", but neither is it rude, nasty, or condescending. It is plain speech, cutting directly to the heart of the matter. Mr. Martin's reply reflects very poorly on his character. It was uncalled for, based on the information to hand.

How do you come to your conclusion that we are seeing an abridged form of the correspondence? Are you Mr. Martin?

Maybe this isn't a traditional "meditation", but I'm not sure which other category is a better fit. So long as MakeMaker/CPAN dominate the process the way they do, it behooves module writers to support it. Alternative tools need to make the transition mostly painless.

yours,
Michael

Since when it is worthy of any kind of meditation to quote private email without permission? And Randal's post does not even make a mediocre attempt at asking for discussion, it just calls for action without thought. It not only doesn't belong in Meditations, as it is it doesn't belong in Perlmonks.

Howdy!

You are welcome to consider the node for deletion. Somehow I doubt that it would garner the necessary support for such action, but...

yours,
Michael

Are you Mr. Martin?

No - I am. For your information, the anonymous monk was correct; Randal is being economical with the facts. He clipped out a very important part of the conversation: my initial reply.

Here's his original message to me:

From: Randal Schwartz
To: Earle Martin
Subject: Re: Acme::Lingua::Pirate::Perl is missing a Makefile.PL

And the installation doesn't get very far without it. Can you get one added 
so I can see what you're doing?

And then I replied. As opposed to what his abbreviated quote at the top of this discussion would suggest, I was perfectly civil. Part of his response may sound familiar.

From: Randal Schwartz
To: Earle Martin

Earle> Sorry, this module requires Module::Build to install, as stated in the     
Earle> README.  

Please add a simple Makefile.PL then, that calls Module::Build. There's an 
example of that in the Module::Build docs, if I recall.                
                                                                          
Your code is not installable from CPAN.pm, which is still the primary means 
of CPAN installation for the majority of Perl users.

At this point I lost patience. I think that's pretty rich coming from the author of Acme::Current, don't you?

-- Earle

Whatever you think of the messenger, the message is accurate.

Most Perl users who install from CPAN do it using CPAN.pm. And I would bet that most do NOT keep CPAN up to date.

At this point I lost patience.

This is all it took to set you off to come back with such a disrespectful and rude remark? Might I suggest some anger management classes or something? Or at very least, grow some thicker skin. Wow...

As far as the number of Perl users who use CPAN.pm, the percentage would obviously be high. One thing that's at least common among the monks is to not unnecessarily complicate things. The K.I.S.S. principal is cited many times around here.

--
"I just read perlman:perlboot," said Tom, objectively.
naChoZ

Howdy!

OK. So merlyn elided the first part of the exchange. He made a perfectly reasonable request. He did not take your initial reply as an absolute refusal and pointed out a good reason why he repeated the request, with a useful pointer to how to simply satisfy it.

If that caused you to lose your patience and respond like an ass, I think you should recalibrate your sensitivities. You still could have said something like "No, I refuse to support MakeMaker."

You had it in your power to act like an adult. You chose something else.

Your last little dig is pretty lame. Do you really want to take the comparison down that path, Mr. Kettle?

yours,
Michael

How do you come to your conclusion that we are seeing an abridged form of the correspondence?

"Your code is not installable from CPAN.pm, which is still the primary means of CPAN installation for the majority of Perl users." doesn't sound like a complete email to me. If that's all it consisted of I don't think merlyn should have been surprised by the response. Either way such incomplete quoting always sets off alarms when I read it.

It was uncalled for, based on the information to hand.

The information we have on hand is one person's account of one part of a (apparently) very brief email conversation on an extremely trivial matter. I wouldn't look too far into it.

Howdy!

The quoted email appears to contain a complete thought.

Terse, yes, but complete.

What else was he supposed to say?

The module author is free to disregard the request (and I don't mean that in a snarky way) without explanation. Common courtesy, however, demands a different tone in his reply. He very deliberately thumbed his nose. All he needed to say was "No, I'm not supporting MakeMaker". Instead, he acted like a child.

yours,
Michael