I can't agree more that prompting costs nothing. Setting the intrusive/secret nature of the eval statement aside for a moment, it's annoying as all get out for an installation to assume that a successful eval get "http://www.google.com" means that my non-port 80 connections work as well. I've always appreciated the prompt in the CPAN first-time config that asks you for a wait server while mentioning that you may not be able to contact it. When I started using CPAN, I didn't know a wait server from Adam's housecat. At least, I knew that contacting one might not be successful.

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