As I’ve said earlier, one thing about open source is that you can fix fairly easily. In Perl this is especially easy, since it is turtles all the way down – many of the libraries are written in pure Perl, meaning that you can step through them with the Perl debugger.

This helped me recently for example, when I was trying to use Net::SMTP with a server which required authentication, and it kept failing on me. Finally I used the debugger to step into the library, and saw the following code:

eval {
  require MIME::Base64;
  require Authen::SASL;
} or $self->set_status(500, ["Need MIME::Base64 and Authen::SASL todo auth"]), return 0;

So, I installed the Authen::SASL module and everything worked. While I would have preferred for the module to say it more explicitly (dying with a suggestive error or in the documentation), but still, the fact that I could look at the source and understand the problem is great.