Re: Re: Litmus test: It's ok to roll your own if...

[perrin]

Reinventing wheels is usually done because someone didn't like the original wheel.

From what I've seen, it's usually done because someone is unwilling to deal with the politics or technical issues of installing a module at their site. Sometimes it's because they're too lazy to check CPAN or to spend any time trying to understand the documentation for existing modules. Or sometimes it's because the perfectly workable API that comes with the module doesn't match someone else's fantasy of the perfect API. Every now and then it is done because someone looked at the existing modules and they didn't meet the project's requirements.

It's often more efficient to reinvent a round wheel, than to submit patches for a square wheel

I have nothing against someone making a new module if the existing modules are not good. Often though, a patch is all that's really needed.

There are no quality requirements for CPAN. Anyone can already load any crap on CPAN, and many already do.

The cream rises. I would never tell anyone to use a bad module from CPAN.

Your reasoning would mean that the first module doing Y that was uploaded to CPAN is necessary the best one.

Certainly not. I never said such a thing.

Had Matt Wright made his formmail.pl available on CPAN, you would have preferred noone else would have created a form to email utility, but they all had used Matt's script.

Matt's script was not good. Someone would have fixed it or replaced it by now.

I don't advocate people blindly using whatever is on CPAN and never questioning the quality, but you'd be a fool to write your own HTML parser these days without a very good reason.