I have to agree with Perrin and others here, you are going to a community resource and expecting that everything will be squeaky-mega-goodness according to the god of Powerman. Sorry, it just aint gonna happen.

I too use email modules from CPAN. I have one system I wrote some years ago which routinely handles a total turnaround flow of around 4 million emails per day. Every single piece of the code running across a farm of eight servers is Perl module based. Every couple of days we seem to have a minor problem that gets reported. In every case bar one in over 12 months the problem was that various ISP's or corporations had implemented things that were not compliant with ANY RFC. The Perl modules for handling network traffic are generally solid, reliable and pretty well maintained.

As for the time issues, well, clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC) but why do I see so many questions about it's reliability, the fact it possibly breaks some standards and isn't necessarilly widely available around the place? And why, in heavens name, are you prepared to accept hardware that is so bad that it NEEDS NTP to reset the clock by that much? Is the software responsible for the irresponsibility of your purchasing people, the stupidity of your sysadmin (for allowing NTP to change clocks at all) and you for not testing any of these things if that is an issue to you? You should ask yourself why people who deal in truly accurate time never change clocks, unless they have to deal with a leap-second.

But beyond that, all I see is you criticising a process you have taken no part in. In my part of the world we have a simple adage Put up or shut up so why don't I see any of the modules you have referred to on CPAN? Why don't I see a CPAN user with a nick like yours?

Show us what Powerman can do, lets see you help to maintain some fo teh code of which you are so critical, or replace it with something better. You may be the greatest programmer on the face of the earth. If you don't like the CPAN ethos, then maybe you should start ePAN.

jdtoronto