I'll add my two cents/centimes to the discussion...

I've been using and writing freeware for a long time. My first piece of code that I made available was an off-line reader for the BIX BBS (the Byte Information Exchange), in 1986 or so. You used an off-line reader to minimize your telco costs - connect to the BBS, download all new messages, read them off-line and write any replies, and then upload them.

These days I've authored and maintain a few modules on CPAN that are all Sybase (the database system) related. Making sure that these modules build correctly on the miriad of systems that are out there (OSes, compilers, perl versions, Sybase versions, DBI versions, etc.) is non-trivial, especially as I only have access to my home machines (linux and an aging Solaris 7 box). Perl actually makes this at least feasible by recording all the information it needed during its build in Config.pm, so that modules getting built at a later point can retrieve the correct information (compiler flags, etc).

Still, there are situations where this breaks - I've got a case at the moment where a user can't build the Sybase::BLK module under Solaris 9 with the latest version of Sybase, and I have no clue as to what the problem might be. With a bit of luck enough others in the Sybase community will try the same thing and come up with the answer, so that I can release a patch (or a new version).

So, to reiterate what others have mentioned - if something doesn't work for you, please let the owner/author know, but also search the web (google is your friend), because in all likelyhood someone else has had the same problem before you.

Michael

In reply to Re: Module compilation hell by mpeppler
in thread Module compilation hell by Anonymous Monk

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