Absolutely true, and mind-numbingly aggravating. I hear "only use core" all the time, or maybe "only use what you can find via yum in the official repositories for this antiquated CentOS version we're using." It's like telling me to only run my car only with what was in it when I bought it, or maybe using the resources available at the dinky little gas station around the corner from my apartment.

It takes little research to discover what modules are available and actively maintained. Unfortunately, that's not enough to satisfy a corporate policy that fears the outside world. Pardon me, I need to go find a brick wall to smash my head against for a few minutes.

Oh, that original could would be at least a little cleaner if it just split each line into a key/value pair and stored the results in a config hash. It wouldn't necessarily solve the problem of the missing value, but it would be easier to debug by reducing lines of code.

Now about that brick wall ...