After writing my latest meditation I went back to searching for some answers and eventually found out that running my test script on Ubuntu was working fine, as I thought it was, but running the same test script on Solaris (targeting the same web server, of course) was breaking. Assuming that there aren't any problems with the different platforms, I had a look at the versions of the modules that might have something to do with the difference.

abeamish@foobar:~/dev$ dpkg -l | grep www
ii  libwww-perl 5.808-1
  WWW client/server library for Perl (aka LWP)
ii  libwww-mechanize-perl 1.34-1
  Automate interaction with websites
[download]

-bash-3.00$ dpkg -l | grep www
ii  libwww-perl 5.821-1
  WWW client/server library for Perl (aka LWP)
ii  perl-www-mechanize 1.52-0
  Perl module for handy web browsing in a Perl object
[download]

So then I went through the change deltas for WWW::Mech and LWP but didn't find anything that suggested that the strategy for GETting has changed. The error I'm getting is

Error GETing https://foo.bar/page.html: Not Found at 05_login.t line 3
+09
[download]

I don't want a 404 error to be a fatal error. If anyone can shed some light on this problem, I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Update Well, I've got things under control for now by kludging together a SKIP block that checks $^O to see if we're running on Solaris .. except that SKIP seems to do a next and breaks out of the loop I'm currently in, and I don't want to do that. More work is required.

Update 2 Cool -- the anonymous monk (three of them, in fact) have wised me up to the autocheck argument. I'll try this out on Monday.