CPAN Testers

Quite a few updates for this month's summary. New CPAN distributions, plenty of fixes, some updates, lots of discussion ... and 27 over million reports!

Firstly, there was a new CPAN distribution relating to CPAN Testers, cpantimes. This is a smoker tester for cpanminus. If your preference for an installer is cpanminus it might be worth taking a look. Toby Inkster also wrote a blog post about its release.

Gabor Szabo asked about how to find modules that weren't being tested on Windows. After some investigation, I updated CPAN-Testers-WWW-Statistics and revised the No reports pages. You can select the Operating System of your choice, and the resulting table lists all the latest distribution releases that have no reports for them. There is a slight caveat in that releases within the last 4 weeks are not included, to give testers a chance to test them. If you spot distributions that shouldn't be included, please me know. Gabor has now followed up with a post detailing 13% of CPAN distributions don't have a test report on Windows.

Our catch-up of reports has gone very well. We're mostly about 2 days behind at the worst, and less than a day for the most popular pages. Diab Jerius's post on the mailing list, asking why there were no reports for MooX::Attributes::Shadow, gave me a chance to post detailing why reports often take time to show, and why the side panel bar graphs can be more up to date than the reports listed on the page. Once I have the latest catch-up processes automated, I will be looking to improve the performance of the page builder.

Also on the mailing list, Nat Goodman posted a question about missing content for some PASS reports. On further investigation, Chris Williams discovered it was a bug in one of the CPANPLUS components. On the other side of the fence, Kirk Kimmel alerted us to what appeared to be CPAN::Reporter is disappearing. Again it took a bit of investigation, but between Kirk and David Cantrell, they discovered Acme::Bleach inside Task::Cpanel::Internal was at the heart of the problem. David Golden is looking add suitable skips to handle the issue. Martin J. Evans started a conversation regarding the use of META files, which led to how the automated tools use them. Andreas König then clarified how configure_requires and dynamic_config are used by CPAN.pm. Reini Urban advertised his distroprefs, and finally Mario Roy thanked the all CPAN Testers for helping with testing MCE (Many-core Engine for Perl).

Although the discussion started in January, I did want to include a topic raised by Ricardo Signes regarding testing of old development versions of Perl. While all of us can see the merit of testing stable releases of Perl, even prior to 5.6, but there really isn't a lot of use in testing anything on CPAN against a development snapshot of 5.11, 5.13 or 5.15. As such, if you're looking to test against development releases, please only use the current development release. At the current time this is 5.17. During the development and testing life-cycle for the next stable release, testing against CPAN can be useful. However, once the the next stable version is released, the old development snapshots are no longer relevant. We'll try and advertise this a little more as stable versions are released, but please bear it in mind if you're testing on a variety of versions of Perl.

On a final note, congrats to Nigel Horne who submitted the 27 millionth test report to CPAN Testers. It was a PASS report for Devel-StackTrace-AsHTML-0.11.

Cross-posted from the CPAN Testers Blog.