CPAN Testers

• Website: blogs.cpantesters.org
• About: This is the new account for incidental and summary updates to what's happening with the CPAN Testers. For all the latest news and views please see our blog.

Recent Actions

• Posted 30 Million Reports to CPAN Testers

  Congratulations to Nigel Horne for submitting the 30 millionth CPAN Testers Report. The report itself was a PASS for DBI.

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - January 2013 - Up to CPAN Testers

  Quite a few updates for this month's summary. New CPAN distributions, plenty of fixes, some updates, lots of discussion ... and 27 over million reports!

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - December 2012 - Shabooh Shoobah to CPAN Testers

  November turned out to be a very eventful and productive month. Aside from various code updates with some CPAN-Testers distributions, including porting many of the tests to Test::Database, and discovering…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - November 2012 - Kick to CPAN Testers

  If I could kick the Amazon SimpleDB we have, I'd take great delight in doing so. Thankfully, our days of relying on it are numbered ... in a good way. More news on this will be forthcoming soon.

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - September 2012 - Listen Like Thieves to CPAN Testers

  We had a bit of downtime on the CPAN Testers last month. Did you notice? I doubt it, as the guys at Bytemark did a wonderful job helping to get us back online. We had a disk failure and with minimal fuss they…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - August 2012 - Wish to CPAN Testers

  August was quite an exhausting month, with several news worthy items. The YAPC::Europe 2012 conference, as mentioned last month, featured a few talks relating to testing, including my own looking specifically at

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - July 2012 - Head On The Door to CPAN Testers

  July was a relatively quiet month for CPAN Testers. Although reports have been flowing, our attentions have largely been elsewhere. Development work behind the scenes is still continuing, but nothing major to report just yet.

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - June 2012 - Seventeen Seconds to CPAN Testers

  MDK is the man! A big thank you to Mark Keating for a great post about how to donate to the

• Posted New CPAN Testers Sponsor: Webfusion to CPAN Testers

  It is with great pleasure that we officially announce a new sponsor for the CPAN Testers Project. Webfusion have provided us with Managed Hosting, for us to use…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - May 2012 - Black Moon to CPAN Testers

  May proved quite an interesting month. Firstly, I got several confused emails relating to the Status page on The CPAN Testers Reports site.…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - April 2012 - Pictures At An Exhibition to CPAN Testers

  Firstly for this summary, I would like to extend a big thank to lestrrat, Mark Allen and Ron Savage for the first individual donations to the CPAN Testers Fund, as…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - March 2012 - Brain Salad Surgery to CPAN Testers

  So March ended on quite a high, following the 2012 QA Hackathon. With so many key people in one room, it was impressive to see how much got done. You can read reports from myself (parts

• Commented on Sponsoring CPAN Testers
  Hi John, that's a very good question. Currently it costs about 3,000 GBP/3,600 EUR/4,800 USD per year for the servers. However, we are currently in negotiations to have some servers donated for our use, which should reduce this by about...
• Posted Sponsoring CPAN Testers to CPAN Testers

  

  CPAN Testers has now been running for nearly 13 years. In that time we have been supported mostly by the community and some…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - February 2012 - Highway 61 Revisited to CPAN Testers

  With 20 million reports, CPAN Testers is very definitely one of the biggest online repositories of test reports for both programming languages and software applications. While other languages and applications may have…

• Posted 20 Million Test Reports to CPAN Testers

  I am rather delighted to be able to announce that on 22nd February 2012, CPAN Testers reached a very significant milestone in our history. We reached and have now surpassed 20 million test reports, as can be seen via the

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - January 2012 - Bringing It All Back Home to CPAN Testers

  January ended up being quite a productive month, with several issues with websites getting sorted finally.

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - December 2011 - Blood on the Tracks to CPAN Testers

  Happy New Year to all. Last year had its ups and downs, so here's hoping that 2012 sees a much more settled year :)

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - November 2011 - Sounds of the Universe to CPAN Testers

  November turned into a rather more traumatic month than I would have liked. It didn't start well with the old hosting company issuing us a invoice for 1 year's hosting, which we had previously cancelled due to their appalling service regards our loss of data. They now claim we still owe them a…

• Posted SQLite Database Fixes to CPAN Testers

  Recently Andreas alerted me to a problem with the SQLite database used to store the basic metadata for the CPAN Testers statistical database, aka cpanstats. On reading the database, for some queries an error message is now being returned; "database disk image is malformed".…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - October 2011 - Some Great Reward to CPAN Testers

  October was a rather quiet month publicly, but behind the scenes there has been a number of fixes, improvements and discussions.

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - September 2011 - Construction Time Again to CPAN Testers

  September has turned out to have been a very difficult and traumatic month for CPAN Testers. Our server problems have now been resolved, but it has meant more time than was intended has been devoted to rebuilding the website eco-system. It's still not complete, but we are getting there.

  Th…

• Posted CPAN Testers Server Update - 29/09/2011 to CPAN Testers

  The last couple of weeks have been distracting for reasons that have nothing to do with CPAN Testers. Sadly Facebook and Google decided to enact their Naming Policy on my accounts, as apparently people in the real world can't possibly exist with mononyms! In the discussions that followed on-line,…

• Commented on CPAN Testers Server Update - 20/09/2011
  @Gabor, they will be a starting point at the very least, as some of the configuration files will be very specific to the setup we have. However, I do plan to document the processes involved, so that anyone wanting to...
• Posted CPAN Testers Server Update - 20/09/2011 to CPAN Testers

  The MySQL databases have now been rebuilt and correctly synced between each other. The SQLite databases are now being updated and these should be completed by the end of the week. This has enabled me to write some simple scripts to create and repair the databases, which I'll now be including in a…

• Posted CPAN Testers Server - Update 14/09/2011 to CPAN Testers

  Initial checks on the database highlighted some discrepancies, which have now been fixed. The databases have now been archived and are now rebuilding. It is hoped that this will be completed within the next few days.

  …
• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - August 2011 - Vapor Trails to CPAN Testers

  All was going well last month, we had a few problems balancing the feed and database inserts, but with some help from Devel::NYTProf, we had improved performance and were getting back on top of things. We also had two presentations at

• Posted CPAN Testers Server Failure to CPAN Testers

  Unfortunately the CPAN Testers server has a failing hard disk, which is only allowing READONLY mode access. As such, all CPAN Testers operations are now failing.

  The host company has confirmed that ...

  a) our disk has a fault
  b) we don't have a second RAID disk (even though we'…

• Posted CPAN Testers Summary - July 2011 - Permanent Waves to CPAN Testers

  957,044 ... that's 957,044

  That's the number of report submissions we saw during the 31 days of July! This biggest monthly submission we've ever had. Just over 40,000 reports more and we would have b…

• Posted Leaderboards & Low Hanging Fruit to CPAN Testers

  Back in May there was some discussion on the CPAN Testers Discussion list regarding the statistics available on the CPAN Testers Statistics website. As I was already in the process of…

Comment Threads

• Phred commented on Microsoft Attack CPAN Testers (Again)

  A couple of questions:

  1) Do you have the facilities to block these with a firewall? (or better yet tarpit them?)

  2) If you really think this is an attack, why don't you contact the appropriate authorities to deal with his? (http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/reporting.htm)

• Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason commented on Microsoft Attack CPAN Testers (Again)

  I posted this on hackernews too.

• Phred commented on Microsoft Attack CPAN Testers (Again)

  @CPAN Testers,

  I'd suggest blocking the perps by ip at the iptables level, that should take care of the immediate problem.

  If you need mirrors, please ask for help. Help is out there :)

  - Phred

• Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason commented on Missing In Action

  I like the CPAN Testers service, but 1 E-Mail a day from an automated system is mass-mailing. They're also sent out automatically (i.e. it's opt-out, not opt-in), so I can see why some would block it on the SMTP level. Which makes these statistics somewhat unreliable.

  Even so, the Reason line for most of these indicates that the user really doesn't exist at the respective mail hosts. So false positive ratio probably isn't all that bad.

• Aristotle commented on Promoting CPAN Testers

  The core question when you want to motivate people in some way is always the same: “Why would I want this / want to do this?” Therefore the story you want to tell for CPAN Testers is this:

  “This month, Joe R. Tester found a bug with X in the Y module, which John Seepanauthor fixed. Peter Othertester found a bug with Z in the Foo module, fixed by Nick Otherauthor. […Etc…] Overall, $n distributions had new releases this month fixing bugs found by CPAN Testers. $n1 of these were found by smokers, $n2 came from casual testers.”

  That answers the core question for a pot…