Pardon my ignorance, but ...
What is the 'default phone-home behavior' in the Makefile.PL's about which Randal was complaining?
Is it the author's 'Perlish' coding style, in which he places statement-ending semicolons at the start of the line? Or something else?
First, let me say that I did not intend for any names to come up, nor did intend my previous message as any type of specific accusation. I was only pointing out an example of percieved misuse that I had stumbled across a while back, and that I thought was relevant to this discussion.
For anyone who wants to see the Makefile.PLs in question they can still be found on some mirrors by googling for, say, 'CGI-Builder-1.24'. Currently, I find them at <http://cpan.cbn.net.id/authors/id/D/DO/DOMIZIO/>.
There are two separate issues here. The first, whether this author did violated some implicit moral code in the way he/she wrote the Makefile.PL. This issue only matters in that if it was something really wrong, then the reviewer might be justified in doing what he did. The behavior in question is that the Makefile.Pl will check to see if LWP is installed, and if it is try to contact the author's website to see if there is a more recent version of the module and if so to notify the user. I guess the main "problem" with this is that it does so without giving the user a choice.
I don't agree with this behaviour. As an option it would be acceptable. Note that there is a module on CPAN that also polls for modules across the internet: ExtUtils::AutoInstall. The major difference, as it relates to this discussion, is that it polls CPAN, a known and trusted site. However, I don't think this justifies the reviewers actions.
And that is the second issue, the one relevant to this discussion: Was this a misuse of CPAN Ratings?
Randy.
