For some time that on different situations I have heard programmers answer and close bug reports with a "Works for me!" sentence.

I think that kind of answer is from somebody that doesn't want to bother asking for details on what is going on, and making his/her software better. When a programmer answers this, why is he or she making his code available? Or, if he or she is making the code available `as is', why they create a project page and the ability to submit bug reports? Also, if it works for you and you are not interested why that piece of code is not working elsewhere, I can't u…

Some of my main modules (modules with more users) bundle C libraries within them: Lingua::Jspell and Text::BibTeX. One of the main problems of doing this is how to detect the C compiler, and how to use it. For example, for windows, I can only support (for now) Strawberry Perl (although I consider that great enough).

At the moment I am using Config::AutoConf to detect libraries and headers. Probably I would use ExtUtils::PkgConfig for libraries that know what that is. But that is not enough. I need to know how to link a standalone library, and that information is not available on any m…

This time I am writing mainly for beginners, and not specifically for Perl programmers, but any programmer of any language. Skels (my abbreviation for skeletons) are totally relevant in a programming environment.

What are skeletons? There are different names for the same thing. You can call it a template, or call it a snippet. Skels, for me, are both: pieces of code, that might work or not, that might have placeholders or not, but that save you time by remembering how something is done.

I have a bunch of skeletons ready to use in my Emacs. I would like to have more, but some…