Unless your managers/IT department are absolutely opposed to your downloading modules into your own home directory, this node: Yes, even you can use CPAN discusses how you to do what toolic is suggesting.

Well, I was thinking of this as well, but with the red tape and all I still don't know if I can introduce foreign code like this. It depends on whether the management will OK this or not, and whether the IT people feel paranoid that day...

In the meantime I'm doing without BAIL_OUT. In the eventuality that I can't use a more modern Test::More at all, what do you suggest?

Yes, thank you!

I'd stumbled across that thread, wasn't sure it would work, but it does (with weird output, though):

Test::Builder->BAILOUT("oh no");
# outputs:
# tests_sante_reporting/02-infocentre-sanity.......NOK 1FAILED--Furthe
+r testing stopped: oh no
# # Looks like you planned 2 tests but only ran 1.

Test::Builder->BAILOUT("oh no\n");
# outputs (yes, like this):
# # tests_sante_reporting/02-infocentre-sanity.......NOK 1# Looks like
+ you planned 2 tests but only ran 1.
# FAILED--Further testing stopped: oh no

Test::Builder->BAILOUT("\noh no\n");
# outputs (yes, also like this):
# tests_sante_reporting/02-infocentre-sanity.......NOK 1# Looks like y
+ou planned 2 tests but only ran 1.
# FAILED--Further testing stopped.
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I think I'm going to go with number 1.

I tried it like this, and it works. BAILOUT is doable. I designed it to have failing tests just to see what happens...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::Builder;
use Test::More;

BEGIN { 
        use_ok( 'Test::Simple ' ); 
}

my $Exit_Code;
BEGIN {
        *CORE::GLOBAL::exit = sub { $Exit_Code = shift; };
}

my $output;
my $TB = Test::More->builder;
$TB->output(\$output);

my $Test = Test::Builder->create;
$Test->level(0);

$Test->plan(tests => 3);
plan tests => 1;

$Test->is_eq( $output, <<'OUT' );
1..3
Bail out!  Sayonara!
OUT

if ($Test) {
      $Test->is_eq( $Exit_Code, 255 );
      $Test->ok( $Test->can("BAILOUT"), "Backwards compat" );
}
else {
     BAILOUT(print  "Sayonara!\n");
}
[download]

Yes, I should have mentioned I tried die()-ing. The tests for this .t end but the rest of the .t try to run; what I'd want is for the harness to realize that something's gone wrong enough that you don't need to run the rest of the tests.