CPAN Testers

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.

In November we reached the 6 million reports submitted mark. It's quite staggering how many reports are being submitted these days. It's now roughly 1 million reports every 3 months! So expect a 10 million reports post some time in August 2010 :)

Now that we are producing so many reports, while there is a desire to get more reports from less tested operating systems, Tim Bunce recently highlighted his interest in getting reports that included a diverse set of Perl configuration flags, in particular regarding how Perl was compiled (with and without threads, etc). At the moment the CPAN Testers Statistics database doesn't include that information, but the Metabase that is behind CPAN Testers 2.0 will. In addition the Metabase will be able to be queried to glean the reports that contain a specific set of flags, etc. At the moment there are quite a few different setups testing on the top few operating systems being tested. While some authors see these as just repeated results, in some cases they provide slight differences in the test results. This is particularly what Tim was interested in for Devel-NYTProf. Hopefully we'll be closer to getting more of that information more readily available soon. In the meantime, if you do want to get involved with CPAN Testers, and only have a traditional operating system available, take a look at some of the reports posted by current testers for the same platform, and see what different setups you could provide.

In the CPAN Testers namespace, CPAN has seen a new upload, CPAN-Testers-Data-Addresses. This release will be the new way for me to manage the tester address mappings. To begin with the testing is being run stand-alone, but it will be shortly be integrated to the CPAN Testers Statistics website. From there it will also be integrated into the new site that is hopefully being launched early next year, which will allow testers to register their testing addresses (among other things). More uploads to the CPAN Testers namespace are being worked on, in particular ones to provide a more programmatic access to the CPAN Testers APIs. More news on those hopefully next month.

This weekend sees the annual London Perl Workshop. Featured in the schedule is Chris 'BinGOs' Williams' talk "Rough Guide to CPAN Testing". If you are a CPAN Tester and are planning to attend the event, please come along and say hello :)

Last month we had a total of 164 tester addresses submitting reports. The mappings this month included 17 total addresses mapped, of which 7 were for newly identified testers. A bit of a low mapping month, mostly due to my attention being elsewhere. With the new mapping system hopefully this will become a little more streamlined for next year.

Until next time, happy Christmas testing :)