CPAN Testers

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.

In recent times we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of testers, smokers and reports. So much so that we are seeing over 400,000 reports each month. This in turn is putting a strain on the Perl NOC, specially the email and NNTP parts of the system.

Initially David Golden has put out a request to CPAN Testers, and posted about it too, to throttle their testing for the next few months, and ease the pressure on the Perl NOC.

As CPAN Testers has now become such a strain on the Perl NOC, they have now given us a deadline of March 1st 2010 to move to CPAN Testers 2.0, which is the HTTP submission form of mails, rather than the SMTP form that it is currently. There have been several steps forward over the last 2 years, particularly by David Golden and Ricardo Signes with their work on the Metabase, and David has actually got the system to work in its basic form, but there is still work to be done.

Now that we have a deadline, the task of completing the relavent parts is now upon us. David is planning to put together a plan of the outstanding work to be done, and get a number of developers involved to help move it forwards quickly to have it all up and running by March 1st 2010. If you're interested in helping out, please join the cpan-testers-discuss mailing list, and let us know.