Catch-22 problem with accessing $entry->{attrs} with perl-ldap-0.16-0.22

[Eric B. <bo...@no...>]

I recently upgraded from perl-ldap-0.13 to perl-ldap-0.22 and some code I had
written broke.

I dropped back to 0.13 and downloaded every version since then. The problem
starts in perl-ldap-0.16 where attrs is a cache.

I have code that looks like this

    $mail_address = ${ $entry->get( $external_addr ) }[0]
      if ( $entry->{attrs}{$external_addr} );

    unless ( $mail_address ) {
      $mail_address = ${ $entry->get( $internal_addr ) }[0] 
        if ( $entry->{attrs}{$internal_addr} );
    }

I did this to avoid error messages about uninitialized values. However, I see
that in 0.16 the attrs hash doesn't get built until $entry->get is called.

So ... I have a catch-22 -- I can't check to see if an attribute exists
without getting a possibly non-existent attribute.

Is there a better way to code for this situation? I tried a couple of ways to
call _build_attrs directly but I couldn't seem to get the syntax right
( $entry->_build_attrs and $entry->Net::LDAP::Entry::_build_attrs).

Please cc to my email address as well as the list. I am trying to subscribe to
the list but I don't know how long it will take.

Thanks in advance,
-- 
Eric M. Boehm                               bo...@no...