13% of CPAN distributions don't have a test report on Windows

Barbie recently created a new page listing all the CPAN distributions without a single Test report.
There are 257 distributions with not report at all and there are 3,487 distributions without any report on Windows (Win32).

Given that currently there are 26,547 distributions on CPAN that represents 13% of all the distributions.

Not bad.

Especially if we compare with some of the other platforms:

GNU/Linux 483
Mac OS X 2,662
NetBSD 2,962
Windows (Win32) 3,487
Windows (Cygwin) 9,983
...
AIX 25,500
...


On those pages, there are a couple of possible reasons why these distributions have no reporst, but I wonder, maybe we could track down a small number of distributions that are the dependencies of most of these modules causing the lack of test. Then those could be either fixed or avoided depending on the situation.

7 Comments

I've already written about the comparative lack of test reports from Windows, as compared other platforms. I'm still not really sure why this is.

http://leonerds-code.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/dear-perl-users-on-windows.html

I run an ActivePerl smoker and have done so for months now. It ---> never gets stuck

"Smoker: Finished all available dists. Sleeping for 458 seconds."

So, if 13% of all dists don't have a report, then that's because they are either entirely unsuited to Windows, blocked by my disabled.yml [2], have dependencies that don't work on windows, or are so badly written they manage to not even get a proper test report out.

[1] In case this wasn't obvious from the sentence itself: Stop complaining while smoking on Strawberry; or debug Strawberry, since the getting stuck has nothing to do with Windows itself.

[2] https://github.com/wchristian/perl16_smoker/blob/master/cpan/prefs/disabled.yml

Oh, ffs, blogs.perl.org, don't interpret my comment as HTML. The first sentence in the previous post ends with me pointing out that my smoker has actually run through CPAN multiple times now without getting stuck and is displaying this right now:

"Smoker: Finished all available dists. Sleeping for 458 seconds."

Finding the ones that block would be the best way to start bugging Strawberry, though. I'm seeing the same behavior.

Then it comes to Windows I prefer to rely on code.activestate.com/ppm/. I had problem with my package hanging on Windows before, and it can happen again in the future. If it will happen, I won't get any reports from cpantesters, so won't fix the problem. ActiveState usually tries to build the package in a day or two after upload, so I just have to go to their site and check results. They are also using some weird compiler, so it helps me to improve portability of the C code.

I just set up two Windows 7 smokers tonight that will be smoking when I don't need them for something else. Currently, testing on 5.12.1 and 5.16.2 but I'll be replacing 5.12.1 with 5.14.3 soon.

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About Gábor Szabó - גאבור סבו

user-pic I blog about Perl.