Of course authors releasing code they've spent their own time and money on should not have to take any kind of legal liability - I'm not suggesting they should.

I'm trying to say that they shouldn't release the stuff on CPAN until there's robust error checking - surely CPAN modules are there for reuse, and for at least a number of developers it's not possible to reuse modules that can fail in fairly catastrophic ways. I'd still argue it's in everyone's interest to have robust modules on CPAN, even though some seem to be arguing the opposite! I'm not so worried if a module throws exceptions or returns error status values from functions, but it *has* to do something! 

Should you be running such a mission critical application
you should have programmers on staff knowledgeable enough to
make modifications to code, or write custom code, that meets
your current requirements.
Yes but what's desired and what happens in reality are often slightly (occasionally vastly) different - you have to factor in deadlines, staff turnover, development costs etc. You may be supplying code to cash rich companies, but they're usually none too generous on the amount they're willing to pay for that code - tends to be the one of the reasons why they're cash rich! You're talking about an ideal which sadly doesn't exist in reality.

What may happen (and I've had this once so far) is that companies increasingly refuse to use non-core CPAN modules. That's bad all round - it increases development costs, increases the chance of bugs creeping in, and hinders the development of existing CPAN modules because authors lose potentially useful feedback/bug reports/code improvements.

In reply to Re: Re: <rant>CPAN modules failing to check for write errors</rant> by Anonymous Monk
in thread <rant>CPAN modules failing to check for write errors</rant> by Anonymous Monk

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