I agree with you in spirit. However, what version of Perl are you expecting users to have installed? Some Koha code has 'use warnings' pounded out in favor of -w on the #! line, with a comment that warnings.pm is not available in Perls lower than 5.6.0. Other Koha code has 'require 5.6.1' in it. Quite contradictory.
Agreed, having a baseline Perl version is a good idea.
Now we're talking about using a module that's standard as of Perl 5.8. That means non-standard with Perl 5.6, non-standard with Perl 5.0.
The misc/Installer.pm has a function checkperlmodules() which runs through the modules that need to be installed. I think you are right, we shouldn't rely on people having Perl 5.8, but we can recommend they install Test::More, Test::Unit, or whatever if they don't already have it.
So - what's the minimum version of Perl that people should be coding for? Should Koha be backwards compatible to Perl 5.0?
I would recommend Perl 5.6.1 ( 5.6.0 was a buggy release of Perl). But I'm not as familiar with the code base as the others on this list. //Ed PS. I'd be interested in hearing what your motivation was for creating another testing framework and how it is different from Schwern's Test::More. -- % perl -MData::Dumper -e "print Dumper($me)" $VAR1 = { 'WEB' => 'http://www.inkdroid.org', 'NAME' => 'Ed Summers', 'AIM' => 'inkdroid', 'EMAIL' => 'ehs@pobox.com' };