Perhaps you think this is a "legacy" issue, but it's not. Write some more systems-oriented code (not neccessarily simple Perl scripts or even Perl applications) and you will see what I mean. Anyhow, if you don't understand my caution, it doesn't apply to you (yet)... which is ok.

As for running builds as part of the test suite, umh, the developers had better run the builds themselves, else you have a serious issue of incompetance to deal with if they think they can check in uncompiled code! At least nightly builds are a very good thing, of course.