Take a look at what I said: ...read what his preferred Scenario was... I don't see how the distinction that you're drawing differentiates between what I said, and what he did.

I suspect that you think I thought he did something different than he did. Allow me to clarify. I think that he encouraged people to do something really stupid. I think that this is a bad thing to do. I'm surprised that he didn't have the sense to realize that it was abysmally stupid, and I'm surprised that when it was pointed out to him, he didn't see that there was an issue.

It seems that you don't think that this was a bad thing to do. Perhaps you've spent less time doing installations that install tons of things from CPAN. That process is already painful enough, anything that causes the installation to break half-way through isn't OK by me. I am less OK with it if you're causing trouble for people because you want to get into their faces and say, Look at me! I'm cool!

Whether or not he followed his own advice, others did. With predictably bad results. If he hasn't released a CPAN module with that setting, then I consider that hypocritical. He encouraged others to do something that was guaranteed to cause complaint, and never chose to experience the complaints himself? Even though he claims that it was the method that he preferred??

I'm glad that you found a way of expressing yourself that convinced him to change that wording. I'm glad that he added the traditional method to Module::Build::Compat. I don't think that it should have taken as long as it did.

As for how long it was there, I assume that the language was there in the original Module::Build::Compat, which was written Apr 2 2002. It was removed on Oct 9, 2004. That's over 2 years. I doubt that I really was the first to point out that it wasn't a good suggestion. Which indicates that the official documentation said that for years.