Have you had a look at the Writing, Installing, and Using Perl Modules section of the Tutorials of this site?

Although SOAP is not something I have used before, I am quite familiar with Writing, Installing and Using Perl Modules.

I am familiar enough that I know the magick incantation...

make
make test
make install
[download]

...doesn't work every single time. I know it is not always easy to get modules to compile correctly on all platforms, but I'm not exactly trying to get this stuff to run on a PocketPC or an X-Box. We're talking standard hardware + Fedora/Windows.

I know from reading p5p and mailing lists the kinds of hoops folks have to jump through to get Makemaker to do everything, and about Build.pm, CPANPLUS, etc.

<soap-box>

I have developed relatively large-scale projects spread across multiple servers, networks and operating systems and have always had this kind of trouble (not only with Perl).

Case in point: JavaScript::SpiderMonkey. SpiderMonkey would be *awesome* to have in several projects (embeddable scripting runtime, anyone?) but it seems that nobody can get this thing to compile. The CPAN Testers page doesn't help any either.

</soap-box>

On the other hand you have Inline::* - installs quickly, runs right out of the box (even on Windows) and does what its label says it does.

I know that the magick of being able to have 99% of everything work great is really nice, but I'm wondering what can be done to smooth out this last 1% of modules that have been difficult (or in the case of SpiderMonkey, nigh impossible) to install since Day One.