I posted this on perl-qa as I belive you are reading that an will respond to it quickly. Actually I was surprised there were no other reports of this - only now did I notice this report

I posted it here as I'd like to get the opinion of a wider audience, not just of the perl-qa list and I'd like to draw the attention to the general case not the specific of your module. In the original post I even mentioned that I don't think petdance has any bad intentions or anything like this. But then it seemed so obvious that I removed this part. For one thing it was not personal and if it seemed like that then I apologize.

Anyway, if that takes a popular uprising to change this in your module and in libwww-perl (which is also failing now for similar reasons) then maybe it should happen.

In any case I am against gnashing of teeth.

Why didn't you just say "Hey, Andy, I'm not comfortable with having Mech go and hit the net." It's not like I don't read email.

xoxo,
Andy

Who cares about my level of comfort here ?

If anything then Mech should be tested against real web sites so it seemed like a good case study showing that it is a dangerous thing as you might get false error reports and the user might conclude that your module is broken while only the tests are fragile.

Actually I posted this in the Meditations as I was sort of thinking aloud but then it was moved to the questions.

Anyway I agree with the earlier post of PodMaster that if you prompt for this question, the default should be no access so automatic tools - such as CPAN smokers - won't break.