On the eve of CPAN Testers
Have a look at the CPAN Testers reports for two TRIAL releases of the same module, one from 2 days ago, the other a little over 3 years ago:
Matrix for Text-Tabs+Wrap 2018.0419-TRIAL
Note: the current version of Perl in late April 2018 was 5.26.2, so all reports on more recent perls came in (long) after the initial testing which I’m interested here. The relevant part of the page is therefore the part from 5.26.2 on down.
Last time, reports started coming in within hours of the release; over 60% of the picture was there within a day; some 85% after 2 days; and the first wave of reports lasted a week.
This time, it took almost a day to even start getting reports, and the diversity has been much lower. 3 days in, reports are still absent for many platforms:
- None for NetBSD, almost none for OpenBSD.
- Only a handful for Solaris (but I’ll admit to small surprise about that one).
- Windows is sparse – although coverage is not notably down relative to last time.
- Cygwin is entirely absent this time – but not a big difference from the one lone report it had last time.
- FreeBSD and Linux are at least healthy – but no longer anywhere near comprehensively covered. (How’s that for something I’d never have expected to see?)
- Who’da thunk the best-covered platform would someday be… Darwin?
(Also of note is that the only 5.8 tested at all so far is 5.8.9, a maintenance release from long after 5.10.0 with little real-world relevance. Last time 5.8 had good coverage, including the most important releases (5.8.1; 5.8.5; 5.8.8). (Of course, any 5.8 is better than no 5.8 at all.))
Within just a few years, we are severely down on CPAN Testers resources.
And that’s compared to 2018, which already was a long way from any kind of golden age for CPAN Testers.
CPAN Testers is on its way out.
I never bothered with CI for CPAN modules before but now it seems an unavoidable necessity.
(And common CI products have never made broad platform coverage easy…)
Waxing philosophical
