Paul Johnson

My third day at the Perl Toolchain Summit was primarily spent in trying to make the cpancover server and infrastructure into more of a production-ready system and less of a Devel::Cover playground. The first step in this direction was supposed to be easy - I made a login for the metacpan group with the idea that they could regularly rsync the coverage results for backup purposes. Unfortunately, this lead me down a yak shaving path I wasn't planning on travelling until later.

When setting up cpancover, I decided to take the easy option and chuck all the results into a single directory. I made the filesystem ext4 so I wouldn't have to worry about hitting limits. Unfortunately, the metacpan box doing the rsync is set up on ext3 and won't support more that 32k subdirectories. So I need to fix up the way that results are stored. I knew this would come sooner or later, even if only because I would surely one day get sufficiently tired of typing ls and immediately regretting it.

In order to make such a change, I need a proper development area to test it. Cpancover has basically just been running since I set it going about three years ago, when I pretty much built it in place. So before making such a large change I need to be able to control things like the docker image being used and the directories being written to. This is also important to be able to allow anyone else to work on the system. So much of the day was spent on this.

Two people separately came to me with the problem that some of their tests require extra modules to be installed and so, by default, these tests aren't run and the coverage suffers accordingly. Four years ago, at the QA Hackathon in Lancaster, a number of clever people got together, and I was there too. We thrashed out The Lancaster Consensus which, thankfully, included a solution to this problem. The environment variable $EXTENDED_TESTING can be set to indicate that the user or process running tests is willing to run optional tests that may take extra time or resources to complete. So I made cpancover set that environment variable, and Graham and Tux altered Moo and Spreadsheet::Read respectively to pay attention to it. I mention this in detail for such a simple change (for me) just to point out (again) the value of the summit, not just for the work which takes place at the time, but also for how it smooths subsequent work, even years later.

I did a few other bits and bobs, and ended up watching an Italian dancing gorilla and a horse on a ladder from Azerbaijan whilst waiting for some modules to install, which can't be bad. (Thanks Eurovision.)

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