Mr. Muskrat

I started smoke testing on Windows a short time ago. I already had Strawberry Perl 5.12.3 and CPAN::Reporter. I installed CPAN::Reporter::Smoker and started it up.

Then I did the same thing on my laptop that was running Strawberry Perl 5.16.2.

I quickly discovered that many modules will hang during the make or make test phase. I looked around the CPAN Testers Wiki and found out about Distroprefs (http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/Distroprefs). I didn't pull down anyone's repo though. I just started compiling a list of my own one by one as I encountered problems (making sure to check for bug reports too).

After a few days, I had pretty much the same list of hanging modules on both PCs. I thought "hey, I already have Dropbox installed on both computers, why not just link the prefs to a directory under Dropbox?"

Open a command prompt with Administrator rights and run:
mklink /D target source

For me that was:
mklink /D c:\strawberry\cpan\prefs c:\Users\mmusgrove\Dropbox\prefs

I'd maintain one copy of the distroprefs files and it would be used by two smokers. I added a few more entries to disable things like ACME and Task modules. It worked really well.

I decided to finally switch away from 5.12.3 so I uninstalled it and installed a 64-bit copy of Strawberry Perl 5.16.2 on one of the PCs. As I started setting up Task::CPAN::Reporter I thought that I would need to enable Task modules before it would install.

That's when I noticed that using Dropbox for such a task is not a good idea unless you remember to remove the link before uninstalling Strawberry Perl. D'oh.