CPAN Testers

May has been a bit of a quiet month, although a few things have been happening in the background. The continuing work of packaging the websites is ongoing, and the plans for the Admin site are coming together. Having said that we did pass the 12 million reports mark in the middle of May too :)

We had a few reports that the testers themselves acknowledged were inaccurate. Although the new Admin site will eventually allow testers and authors to tag reports, the site isn't quite ready for release yet. As such, I now have a script, which uses the guts of the forthcoming Admin site, to hide broken reports. The reports are not deleted, as they may be of use in the future, but hidden from the statistics calculations. If your smoker does send a selection of bad reports, please let me know, and I'll see if I can hide them. As mentioned, the Admin site will eventually take on this role more officially.

Unfortunately we had a bit of a problem with backups recently, which has resulted in the one of the files used to cache the statistics, becoming corrupted. The cache file is currently being rebuilt and hopefully the Statistics site will be back online within the next few days.

The backups resulted in the hard disc filling up, as the backups now take up a noteable amount of space. As a result, the offline backup process will be taking place a little more frequently. I'm currently reviewing the server options available to us, with a view to increasing processing power and disk space to allow us to expand over the next few years. Our current server plan still has several months to run, so we have time to migrate to a new machine. We'll warn you before any switch-over, although as long as applications are using the cpantesters.org URLs, there should be no noticable change.

This month David Golden hopes to review the current Metabase. We've had problems with Amazon, and not just because of the recent outage, but as David notes, with the number of reports submitted into the CPAN Testers database doubling in the last year, we need to look at ways to keep the processing and testing stable. With the Metabase this will involve investigating the best storage mechanism for our needs.

At the Birmingham Perl Mongers May technical meeting, another hackathon session took place. This time they looked at integrating their Devel-Platform-Info distribution into the CPAN Testers framework. The first fruits are the release of CPAN-Testers-Fact-PlatformInfo, with patches to clients and transports in progress. The work will continue in the June hackathon session, with plans to complete a write up, so that anyone wishing to add more metadata to reports can follow a guide. If your user group plans to have a hacking session on some of the CPAN Testers software, please let us know and we'll feature it in a future summary.

Conference season is fast approaching, and this month YAPC::NA 2011 takes place in Asheville, NC in the US, June 27-29. There is no specific CPAN Testers talk, but there are talks on uploading CPAN modules and testing in general. If you are planning to give a CPAN Testers talk at a conference, workshop or local technical user group, please let us know.

That's all for this month. Happy testing.

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog