| Subject: | Misleading error message in modulemaker interactive mode |
Terrence Brannon wrote me: "I freaked out when I hit H to save and generate and was told the ABSTRACT was too long... immediate feedback is preferred." I confirmed the problem. More specifically, when using the modulemaker utility in interactive mode, if you enter an ABSTRACT of > 44 characters and then generate a module with either "G" or "H" from the Main Menu, you get an error message that says that the abstract is too long -- but the correct directory/file structure is generated and the text you entered for the abstract is entered correctly in Makefile.PL and lib/*.pm.
So the error message is spurious. The question of the maximum length of a module's abstract is somewhat ambiguous these days. search.cpan.org has no problem with abstracts longer than 44 characters (I'm not sure if it has an upper bound), and that's where most of us come into contact with module abstracts these days. But, per Andreas Koenig (http://tinyurl.com/7mvpk), the database behind pause.perl.org still works on a 44-character-max basis. But while that database still supplies some info to CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS.pm, I'm not sure whether ExtUtils::ModuleMaker should rigidly enforce that limit.
So I'll have to think about what should be done in the next version of EU::MM and modulemaker.