Re: Top Seven (Bad) Reasons Not To Use Modules

[BrowserUk]

I am not allowed to install modules sitewide

Fine, so install them locally! Perl doesn't care whether you have installed modules locally or sitewide, they'll work just the same. In fact, you can even set up your own version of Perl to make sure that all your module versions are controlled by you, locally, and not your OS or your site's administrator.

All very well for scripts that only you use, but if you're a corporate hack and your tools have to be rolled out to production machines...they ain't gonna work there.

And corporate shops have rules for a reason. And what you're advocating would in many places be seen as grounds for not just dismissal, but prosecution.

[talexb]

And corporate shops have rules for a reason. And what you're advocating would in many places be seen as grounds for not just dismissal, but prosecution.

Exactly. If you're developing stuff for your own amusement, then deployment to a dozen systems running mission critical stuff is never going to be a problem.

In my case it is -- which means I have to look closely at whether I absolutely need a module, or whether I can get by with something a little less 'jazzy'. This week's query was about using WWW::Mechanize -- that module isn't installed on the system I'm developing for, but LWP::UserAgent (which Mech uses) is present, so that decision is made for me.

If you look at it from the IT guy's perspective, installing a module is no easy task: the latest version of X might mean you have to upgrade Y, which has always worked fine, and of course that means you need to also update Z and W .. and pretty soon, subtle problems start to turn up. And I ran into a 'version' problem recently, where an older version of Mech worked fine, but the newer one, on a different platform, didn't.

[bellaire]

Great point. I've never been fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to work in a corporate environment with policies that create such liability problems. If you have no choice, then you have no choice, and all my thoughts on the subject are completely irrelevent.