[no subject]

[Dave Brown <dbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I encountered a wierd error when trying to configure the most recent LAS 5
code with the most recent version of perl (5.6.1) and all newly
downloaded modules. The configure script barfed as follows:

If the Web server is running, I can make sure that it is a server
supported by LAS. 
Is the server running? [yes] 
Checking server...
[Mon Jan 14 18:22:42 2002] configure.pl: Can't locate object method "new"
via package "URI::URL" (perhaps you forgot to load "URI::URL"?) at
./configure.pl line 541, <STDIN> line 7.

So I spent a while trying to figure out where URI::URL would be loaded
from and also comparing this new environment with previous versions on 
other machines where configure.pl runs without a hitch. 

Finally I figured out that in earlier versions of perl URI::URL gets
loaded as an enventual consequence of a 'require LWP::UserAgent' in 
configure.pl. The loading actually happens in the HTTP::Message module
with these lines of code:

$HTTP::URI_CLASS ||= "URI::URL";
eval "require $HTTP::URI_CLASS"; die $@ if $@;

This was I believe version 1.23 of Message.pm.

The reason that it was croaking for me is that the new version of
Message.pm (1.25) changes these lines to the following:

$HTTP::URI_CLASS ||= $ENV{PERL_HTTP_URI_CLASS} || "URI";
eval "require $HTTP::URI_CLASS"; die $@ if $@;

which seems to say that if the environment variable PERL_HTTP_URI_CLASS is
not defined then rather than requiring URI::URL as the previous code did,
now just require URI. And indeed by setting as an
environment variable PERL_HTTP_URI_CLASS to URI::URL I was able to get 
the configure script to complete successfully. 

Does anyone know why this incompatible change has been made to the perl
code? (Could it be a bug in the module?) And unless there is something I
have done incorrectly with my perl install (that I hope someone can help
me figure out), I'd like to alert the LAS developers to this change.
 -dave 
 dbrown@ucar.edu