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.

Huh? Maybe I did again say things I didn't want to say (english is anything but my mother-tongue); but I didn't meant to contradict you....

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.

So congrats for never forgetting to check in everything, and for never producing incompatibilities against code-changes a co-worker did make simultanious to yours, on different files... :-P

that a thing builds on your system doesn't mean it builds freshly checked out. And testing without a fresh build from a freshly updated <SourceControlSystemOfYourChoice>-snapshot wouldn't be proper testing IMO. If such a thing happens here, the developers in question get mails, including all error-messages and all changes with commit-comments done since the last build at most 15minutes after the checkin, very sensible and cool thing to do, really! (we're using CruiseControl, maybe there's a perl-solution out there I don't know of...)