CPAN Testers

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

The most notable fix was getting the summary emails running again. It is still not perfect just yet, but I'm hoping that the ongoing fine-tuning will reduce the bouce-backs and faults that I'm currently seeing. The configurations are all from what was in the database at the end of August, so apologies if you've wanted to change these. The configurations are normally exposed via the Preferences website, but as the SSL certificate for the new server hadn't been approved it has a little longer than anticipated to get it up and running again. GoDaddy have now approved this and it's all ready to go, so I'm hoping this can all be sorted in the next few days.

There are still some problems building the web pages, with some reports gettting missed. However, I now have tools in place that double-check what is being processed, and re-inject any reports to the build queue that may have got missed. The fact that the builder and the feed parser are now capable of processing so much so quickly does now mean that to a large degree proessing is now near real-time. Typically the majority of reports are now available on the Reports website within a few hours of being submitted.

Some of the discussions behind the scenes have been to discuss sponsorship. We currently have two large international corporations who are interested in supporting CPAN Testers. Hopefully we can progress this over the next few months and early next year we can give you more details. The discussion of sponsorship have also led to discussions of potentially setting up a donation fund for CPAN Testers. Over the years we have had several people approach us asking if they can contribute to CPAN Testers. As we aren't a legal entity, it hasn't been something we have actively persued previously. However, we are now in talks to set something up for the future, and again hopefully in the new year we'll be able to tell you more details.

I would like to thank everyone who has been very supportive of CPAN Testers over the last few months. It has been a frustrating few months, but so many have contacted me personally or posted on lists and IRC to add their thanks and support for what we do. It really is very much appreciated.

To finish with, I have a few stats for you. As mentioned previously in August we managed to submit over 1 million reports in a single month. In the two months following we haven't quite matched that submission rate, but it's not been too far behind. So much so that we have now nearly 17 million reports in the database. We currently have reports covering 27 different Operating Systems, although around 18 of them are being tested on a regular basis. The page builder is now capable of processing several hundred thousand reports a day, and so can easily cope with the growing number of testers and smokers we'd like to see contributing to CPAN Testers.

There is still a lot happening behind the scenes, but looking forward to 2012 we are in a much better position to grow CPAN Testers for the long term future. We have an enviable infrustruture within the programming language and QA worlds, and we like to keep it that way :)

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog