in reply to Careful with Test::Pod::Coverage

Actually, for those of us who support 'deep' backwards compatibility for their modules, Test::More itself is problematic. If you blindly 'use' it, you can break 5.005 compatibility for people running very old installations that lack Test::More.

Since I wasn't specifically aware of the 'misversioned dependancy' problem with Test::Pod::Coverage, I have not yet written defensive code for it. I have written defensive code for Test::More (example taken from my Class::NamedParms module): 

use strict;

use lib  ('./blib','../blib', './lib', '../lib');

eval {
    require Test::More;
};
if ($@) {
    $|++;
    print "1..0 # Skipped: Test::More required for testing POD coverag
+e\n";
    exit;
}
eval {
    require Test::Pod::Coverage;
};
if ($@ or (not defined $Test::Pod::Coverage::VERSION) or ($Test::Pod::
+Coverage::VERSION < 1.06)) {
    Test::More::plan (skip_all => "Test::Pod::Coverage 1.06 required f
+or testing POD coverage");
    exit;
}

Test::More::plan (tests => 1);
Test::Pod::Coverage::pod_coverage_ok( 'Class::NamedParms', { also_priv
+ate => ['DEBUG'] });

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Re^2: Careful with Test::Pod::Coverage. And with Test::More
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Nov 14, 2005 at 19:33 UTC

    Surely the solution is to mark Test::More as a dependency in your installer. It only became a core module in Perl 5.8.0, though it's also core in Perl 5.6.2 now.

[reply]
      If only life were that simple. Automatic installation of dependancies didn't get added to CPAN until early in 1999. 5.005 came out in mid-1998. Therefore, although modern CPAN can automatically install dependancies, old perl installs don't necessarily take advantage of it because their installed versions of CPAN may be too old.
[reply]

        I wonder whether someone running software that old would even be interested in automatic dependency resolution. I figure if they’ve not upgraded in such a long time, it must be because stability is so important to them that they are quite willing to endure the pain of installing complex software by hand – along with all the other tradeoffs that come with running nearly decade-old software.

        In other words, I’ll make a token effort to not make deployment on such systems gratuitously difficult, but I also don’t see why I should make my own software development gratuitously difficult. There is a balance to be struck; abstaining from all progress is not it.

        Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]

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