Already at my last work, me and some others were looking at doing things the XP way, we read Fowler's refactoring, and studied stuff on the web, trying to put some of that in practice. I've also read chromatic's excellent article on testing at perl.com, and now recently Ovid's meditation, The Joy of Test. I'm still not always a good boy with this testing, but I am gonna get there. Promise.

My questions came up when I was wondering if I should use the standard module Test or if I should use the more powerful Test::More. I'd really like to use the latter, but it isn't included in the standard distribution.

So, if I actually someday create something good enough to distribute, should my test.pl be using Test::More, potentially giving people errors during 'make test' and have them install this module, or should I try to go with the standard Test to avoid this?

Question number two is about the module CPAN, and if I actually make something that great it could be uploaded there - I know that it follows prerequisites somehow (via Makefile.PL?) during install (if you ask it to); is this done before the test script, so I could name Test::More as a must-have module and CPAN.pm will take care of this?

To sum it up: should I usually use standard modules, even if there is a better alternative readily available, and how do I make sure a user can install my stuff including modules it needs with as little trouble as possible?

Personally, I would simply install Test::More or whatever and try again if this happened to me, but I wonder what is customary, how you do it, and what you recommend. :) I'd rather a user be scared by my module than by the install *grin*

Thank you.

You have moved into a dark place.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

In reply to Use a standard module or a "better" one, and how to make installing it troublefree. by Dog and Pony

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