This program assumes that you already have the Hesiod libraries installed
on the system you plan to install the module on, and gives no assistance
or instruction on the Hesiod install.

The module installs using the standard Perl 
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
method, but because of some system dependencies, you will likely need to
modify some stuff at the top of the Makefile.PL.

First off, you will need to indicate where the hesiod library stuff is.
On my systems, it is under /usr/local/athena, and that is what it defaults
to.  The Perl variables $HESIOD_LIBDIR and $HESIOD_INCDIR should point to
the location of the libhesiod.a, etc. library and the hesiod.h include file
respectively.  Since usually these are in lib and include subdirectories of
some common Hesiod root, you can usually just set $HESIOD_ROOTDIR appropriately
and the other two will be fine.

The other option you may need to adjust is the $HACKS variable.
There are 2 "HACKS" currently defined to deal with cases in which 
systems lack some components of the passwd structure.  The variables
$PW_QUOTA_HACK and $PW_COMMENT_HACK determine whether the defines
DONT_HAVE_PW_QUOTA and DONT_HAVE_PW_COMMENT are sent to the C-code.  If set,
the quota and comment fields returned by the hesiod getpwnam and getpwuid
functions will be undef.  The system tries to determine whether these hacks
are needed automatically when Makefile.PL is run, but if it errs you can
manually override them.

The system also tries to automatically determine whether it needs to link
again libresolv.a, etc. or not.  (Actually, it just determines whether 
libresolv exists, and if so links against it, whether needed or not).


Finally, the tests require a fair amount of site specific information to
work properly.  You need to provide a name and type for a valid query, and
its results, a valid username and his mail host entry, etc.  The script
t/make_testdata.pl will get called when Makefile.PL is executed, and will
prompt for the information if t/testdata.pl does not already exist.  You
can add/change site specific information by manually editting the testdata.pl
script or by running make_testdata.pl with the -f flag.  Even so, it is
hard to get a truly good set of tests run which report success/failure 
accurately.  The tests seem to generate a lot of false failures--- if most
of the tests are passing, it might behoove you to edit the failed tests to print
out more information and see if really failed.  

If you are getting really odd port numbers in getservbyname and relatives,
check the setting of -DHESIOD_PORT_ENDIAN_HACK.

Thus far, the code has been successfully installed/tested on the following
systems:
alpha-dec_osf
i386-linux
sun4-solaris