Joel Berger

I have mentioned before how much I like CPANtesters! Here is another story.

Yesterday I got an email from them listing a number of failures from Galileo, my CMS. I had recently pushed some bugfix releases, but it had some new, and as yet unused code and tests for that code in it. The tests passed on all my Linux systems, so I wasn’t worried about the release. Yet the failures came in. Some on Linux, some on other platforms, but not all the tests were failures and I couldn’t figure out a pattern. CPANtesters put me on to a problem but for this I needed faster results.

I had heard about Travis-CI, a free continuous integration platform based around GitHub. I set up travis testing for Galileo and sure enough it failed there. Though it was frustrating I now had failing tests that I could run at will! After much trial and error, I found that I had an undeclared dependency, but due to the way I was testing, it was throwing a seemingly unrelated error. My problem was that all my systems have the module installed and so I didn’t get the failure on my box, its a common module File::Next (used by Ack) and so many of the CPANtesters had it as well.

CPANtesters alerted me to the problem and Travis-CI let me continuously test on fresh platforms (5.10/12/14/16) until I found the problem. I love open source.

I have released Galileo 0.026 which fixes the problem. There are exciting additions to Galileo in the works, slowed only by my upcoming Ph.D. defense (which obviously takes much of my time). I hope that by this summer Galileo will have several of the most requested features you have told me that you would like.

Happy Perl-ing and remember to thank those projects and developers who make your lives easier, both in person and in public. Thanks guys!