tilly,

you are one of the most experienced monks here at the monastery and from not only the number of your posts but also their content one can be quite sure, that your "highscore-position" here pretty much correlates with your perl skills.

I do not know what previous issues you might have had with etcshadow, but I'd like to look at this thread without considering them. If I do, I see on the technical side very many precious facts and alternatives to our problem, on the other side I see many IMHO unnecessary attacks against etcshadow. Sure, the BEGIN "solution" might bring complexity to the code and later on even more subtle problems that'd be absolutely hard to tackle.

OTOH we took his advice "put everything into BEGIN" more lika a rule of thumb exactly as yours "every module should load a few modules and be loaded by many".

In fact etcshadows advice

• was the first answer that came in and it contained a real solution for our problem. The system compiled again within minutes.
• it was good for us, because it gave us something to think about, as this was a blind spot in our design. Before we had an attitude "perl is great it will handle this somehow" - even circular references. Hell it worked for more than five years!
• by thinking about it, we were able to deduct the "badness of circular reference" even before your post came in.

In short, his answer was valuable for us. By providing your comments on that matter, we got everything one can only hope for - a thorough and detailed view on this matter.

We see both contributions as valuable, perhaps even the value comes only with some argues, but let me state, that some of your formulations remind me of merlyn when he - undoubtedly also a perl capacity - got beaten by seemingly being too harsh in his comments.