Preventing missing dependencies

[Paul Makepeace]

An ongoing source of frustration for those of us installing on fresh
boxen are modules that don't have adequate build & test dependencies
set. It's one of those classes of errors that seems to be "dumb" in the
sense of being automatically preventable, and yet isn't quite yet.

I've heard of one project to build a cpan farm and automatically issue
RT tickets for missing deps. That's great but it needs to be closer to
the coalface.

How about: modify the behaviour of 'use' to fail unless a module has been
listed in the build/test dependencies.

"attempt to use Blah without specifying it as a dependency in Foo.pm line 4"

There's some finesse needed to allow depended-upon modules that are
pulled in by the parent module, e.g. Jo Programmer shouldn't need to put
a dependency in for HTTP::Status when using LWP::Simple.

I'm not sure whether it's even possible to modify use like that without
a source filter...

Paul (cc'ing Module::Install authors; apols if some of you aren't current)

-- 
Paul Makepeace .............................. http://paulm.com/inchoate/

"What is the colour of Sunday? Specker of dust."
   -- http://paulm.com/toys/surrealism/