use Perl

• phone_home on a mail module? (Score:1)

  by dagolden (6584) on 2006.09.13 9:14 (#49995) Journal

  Normally, I'm totally opposed to a "phone_home" attempt hidden in a module, but this is for sendmail and it's in a test file.

  Moreover, the author has this disclaimer:

  # unattended Mail::Sendmail test, sends a message to the author
  # but you probably want to change $mail{To} below
  # to send the message to yourself.

  So this one doesn't bother me so much, as it seems well-intended as part of a test instead of being something for tracking purposes.

  There's probably a clever ways to test without actually needing to send a message (e.g. mocking the system call to sendmail) or some better prompting ("Do you want to send a test message? Message address (default is author)?"). Maybe sending a patch for the test file would be accepted by the author.

  Reply to This

  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    The disclaimer doesn't matter much when you're running cpanplus and you see it scroll past and there's nothing you can do about it. Also, I'm sure there are plenty of folks who can think of reasons why they don't want email automatically sent, whether they saw a warning message flash by or not.

    And yes,someone (possibly me since I'm grumbling) should offer a patch. At the very least, something which prompts the person "do you really want to send an email?"
    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Abigail (26)

      It might me just me, but if such mails bother you, perhaps you shouldn't blindly run software you downloaded from the web. Automatically even.
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by link (3402)

    There is a warning when Makefile.PL is run but not very much time to cancel out if you really do not like the idea. A prompt would be nice.
    Not really too naughty , well compared to the CPAN module that (used to?) downloads some perl code from the authors website and eval it.