QA Hackathon 2014 and CPANTS

I mostly worked on CPANTS at the QA Hackathon in Lyon, as I did in the previous years.

As one of the significant topics of the hackathon was PAUSE permissions, I started to add PAUSE permissions handling to the CPANTS analyzer (thanks to Ricardo Signes), and introduced a "no_unauthorized_packages" metric as an extra one. Because the PAUSE permissions index hasn't kept the date/time when one got or lost the permissions, this metric may return a different result from search.cpan.org in a rare case when a person who had necessary permissions and successfully released a distribution eventually lost the permissions. More fixes on permissions to come later.

I also started investigation required to implement a few more metrics/features including "has_abstract_in_pod" (which Neil Bowers explained me at the hackathon, and kindly gave me a code). I'm hoping I can bring some out by the next month (I haven't released a newer version of Module::CPANTS::Analyse yet, hoping to include these).

I fixed "package NAME BLOCK" handling in Parse::PMFile, which is derived from the PAUSE code and used in the CPANTS analyzer to extract package versions in a distribution (thanks to a report from Kent Frederic). The same fix has been merged into PAUSE.

One more tweak was done in Parse::PMFile (and PAUSE) to pay respect to the wit in Acme::Pi, which was released at the hackathon by Karen Etheridge, and Andreas König much appreciated her wit (so did I).

I finished migrating Twitter Bootstrap (which CPANTS is using now) from version 2 to 3, to make it easier to tweak the appearance of the site. This is mainly to address a color issue for some people. I started using colored glyphicons to show which metrics pass or not, but there may be a better way in this area. Heart characters in Unicode were referred at the hackathon, but unfortunately they are not always available to everyone. I'm looking forward to your ideas!

Discussion on gamification, and CPAN Dashboard by Neil Bowers gave me a lot of insights as well, though I haven't added anything extra for gamification nor new statistics yet. I also tried to explain what I did with Acme::CPANAuthors as an example. I hope it made some sense.

Aside from CPANTS, I failed to attend the discussion on DBI::Test at the hackathon. I only shipped yet another release candidate of DBD::SQLite there, and also new stable DBD::SQLite (1.42) after I came home. As of this writing, CPAN Testers haven't complained about it yet.

Lastly (but not least), I'd like to thank Philippe Bruhat and Laurent Boivin for organizing this great event (again!), Wendy van Dijk for food and liquors and more, the generous sponsors for allowing me attend from the Far East. Thank you.

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About Kenichi Ishigaki

user-pic a Japanese perl programmer/translator, aka charsbar