Bug #81541 for Archive-Extract: Testing PREFER_BIN and Windows

The Archive::Extract docs recommend setting $PREFER_BIN for large files, but this behaviour is untested on Windows since 4553a37, which skips errors on windows when using binary tools. There are several related issues here: * On most Windows systems, which don't have the binary tools, using $PREFER_BIN should be safe, since it should fall through to using Perl modules. * The tests don't actually check that. Perl-only and binary-only are tested in turn, but not having both being allowed at once or having one falling through to t'other. Even if it isn't useful to test using binary tools on Windows it should still be possible to test that trying to use non-existent binary tools correctly falls through to using Perl, for example so we can add in a test to prevent this bug re-occurring: https://github.com/jib/archive-extract/pull/2 * If binary tools shouldn't be used on Windows, it's unfortunate that the docs recommend setting $PREFER_BIN in some circumstances. It'd be useful to have a setting which means 'prefer binary tools if we're on a platform where that's sensible'. Perhaps $PREFER_BIN = 1 could just be changed to mean that? (As in, ignore it on Windows -- after all, it's only a preference.) A second variable, $INSIST_ON_BIN, could be created to insist on using the binary tools on all platforms. That would automatically fix existing code which is using $PREFER_BIN to do the right thing on Windows. Or, if tweaking the meaning of $PREFER_BIN = 1 is unacceptable, maybe another value, such as $PREFER_BIN = 'platform' could be introduced to mean 'do the most appropriate thing for the current platform'. That would then require evangelizing to people currently using $PREFER_BIN = 1. Any thoughts? Cheers Smylers -- I get called "evil" by Victoria Coren in this week's 'Only Connect'. Watch online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p2mrh