CPAN Testers

We had a bit of downtime on the CPAN Testers last month. Did you notice? I doubt it, as the guys at Bytemark did a wonderful job helping to get us back online. We had a disk failure and with minimal fuss they replaced the disk and had us back up and running within a few days of spotting the problem. Such a far cry from the fiasco of our previous hosting company. Many thanks to all the guys at Bytemark.

A major catch-up of reports was undertaken last month, and we managed to retrieve several thousand reports missing from the results that Amazon send us via their broken API to SimpleDB. I'll be running another catch-up for the last month this weekend too. Thankfully Andreas König has created a script that will help me combat the problem in the future, and potentially reduce the impact of requests on the Metabase too. In the short-term it should mean we are less prone to missing reports, although in the longer-term moving to a new Metabase will eradicate the problem completely. Discussions are on-going at the moment with regards to the longer-term plans of the Metabase, and we hope to have more news on that for you soon.

CPAN Testers helped out Neil Bowers last month, when he added some test scripts to his distribution, Module::Path. His blog post details the steps he took in creating the tests and how he was able to refine them with each release. The story uncovers some interesting asides that emphasise why testing is important, as well as some unusual edge cases.

Last month I mentioned Brian Cassidy's CPAN::Changes Kwalitee Service, and how his next target was to reach 10,000 releases passing his tests. I'm pleased to say that as of the time of writing, there are now 10145 distributions passing his tests. I'm not sure what his next target is, but it would be nice to see another 405 releases passing to reach 40% :)

On the mailing list, Leo Susanto had trouble with including files in his gcc compilations, David Golden asked for test feedback for HTTP-Tiny, and Shlomi Fish asked for the best way to test for the existence of header files from external libraries. Finally Neil Bowers asked about having a smoker that can specifically tests development releases, as a lot of the test reports don't include them. The main for not including them, is that several smokers are set up for installation, and typically most people don't install development releases. However, many of the hardcore CPAN Testers are quite happy to test, but for other reasons their smokers may not pick them up. Several testers responded with example scripts and ideas, and at some point I'll collate these and add them to the Wiki, unless someone else gets there before me.

Unfortunately the summary was rather delayed this month, due to my current workload, but I aim to be back on track again for next month.

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.