Task::CPAN::Reporter and CPAN::Mini to the rescue
After the recent problems with Bash::Completion and Bash::Completion::Plugins::perlbrew on my system I realized that maybe the problem I was having is in the actual default operating system install of Perl. To investigate this problem I did a fresh install of openSUSE 11.4 64-bit into a VirtualBox. After running the security updates I installed Task::CPAN::Reporter to pull in what I needed and configured cpan to send reports in. I used the metabase_id.json I had already generated for my development machine as it is recommended to share this file if you plan to have multiple systems sending in reports.
So in the fresh test environment did Bash::Completion install correctly? No, it failed during the testing stage just like before. I dug through the openSUSE package manager, installed and re-installed different things and tried cpan Bash::Completion over and over again. After running out of ideas I set this problem aside for now and focused on other issues that came up during this process.
cpantesters.org is a great resource for information about which modules work on what platforms. That said there is a delay between when reports are submitted and when the statistics get updated on the website. Do not freak out if your report does not show up for a while. If you are really worried there is a log file that is updated every 5 minutes with the latest submissions. This log only has the last 1000 reports so your report could easily be off the list in under an hour. So I browsed the different distributions I use and looked into others that had interesting names. At some point along the line I decided that I was going to turn my vm I just created into a smoke testing machine.
I installed CPAN::Reporter::Smoker to handle the automation of the tests and CPAN::Mini to make a local CPAN mirror. minicpan a program that comes with CPAN::Mini provides a simple to use cli to get the process rolling.
minicpan -l minicpan/ -r http:://cpan.netnitco.net
and a little over an hour later I had a 1.8 gigabyte minicpan mirror. After reading the CPAN::Reporter::Smoker POD and adjusting my configuration accordingly I was ready to start automated testing.
perl -MCPAN::Reporter::Smoker -e start
I am currently monitoring the smoke test vm and plan to post future observations.
I like writing Perl code and since most of it is open source I might as well talk about it too. @KirkKimmel on twitter
Welcome to CPAN Testers! If you haven't seen it, check out the CPAN Testers Analysis website. If the most recent upload of a distribution has at least 3 passes and 3 fails, it provides a regression analysis to identify potentially significant factors between the pass and fail cases. (E.g. operating system, version of perl, test output, etc.)
-- David