Deprecated annoyances

[tilly]

Every so often I notice that someone has managed to take care of a significant annoyance that I had with some module. For instance this morning I noticed that you can now use Exporter 'import'; and not mess with @ISA. (Which is how I think it should have been done in the first place.) One annoyance gone (though I predict that the old meme won't die anytime soon).

A couple of months ago I noticed that Module::Build::Compat supports a 'traditional' target, solving most complaints that I had about using the 'passthrough' one.

Both of these are great, but of course they do no good until I noticed that they have been fixed.

So what annoyances have the rest of you (probably belatedly) recently noticed that there are now solutions for?

[Old_Gray_Bear]

A few months back I started working at a shop that is using a version of Perl more recent than 5.005. (long story; short version: Legacy Code in a Banking System.) Last week I found out that I can now do lexical file-handles and I can quit mucking about with the Symbol module. Small thing, perhaps, but it makes me happy....

[perrin]

Catalyst now supports passing args in $c->forward(). The upcoming version of Data::FormValidator has an easier way to check if the validation passed or not.

[samtregar]

I recently realized that you could use $DB::single to stop the debugger at a particular line. It's so much easier than trying to feed the debugger 'b' command!

-sam

[adrianh]

So what annoyances have the rest of you (probably belatedly) recently noticed that there are now solutions for?

h2xs is not as bad as it used to be.

[tlm]

ref now returns an empty string, instead of undef, when its argument is not a reference. Hence expressions like

ref $x eq 'CODE'

don't produce annoying warnings in such cases.

There's a little coding guideline lurking in there somewhere... Something like "never return undef when the empty string would be just as good."