> Hi, although I greatly appreciate the provided service (cpan smoking) it has
> the disadvantage to give the result long after I need it which is before I
> release to CPAN.
>
> I would like to see the possibility to run smoke tests as part of my pre-
> release tests. I see no reason to release a module if it doesn't work on a
> specific platform or at least I'd like to list that platform as unsupported.
> Although most often the errors are simply found because the test smoking
> machines have a different setup.
You can release a development version of a module to the CPAN. Smokers
will pick it up and test it, but it'll be invisible to users unless they
specifically request the dev version.
> I also believe that the smoke test platforms should be available, on a
> cpan/perl/smoke test related site, as virtual machines when possible.
This isn't possible for some of the more interesting platforms because
of licencing constraints.
> This
> would lower the demand on the smoke test infrastructure. There are VMs
> available for download, IE on the OsZoo site, but those differ from the
> "official" smoke boxes.
The current bottleneck isn't on smoke boxes, but on the infrastructure
for dealing with the reports they generate.
> Running smoke tests in VMs would have the added advantage to add redundancy to
> the smoking infrastructure.
There's already plenty of redundancy for those platforms for which it
would be practical to make VM images available - those being the common
free x86 OSes. The ones where we only have limited coverage - eg Sparc,
Alpha, MIPS, Windows, IBM - are those for which we can't make VM images
available, either because of OS licencing constraints, or because
there's no suitable virtualisation environment.
> Can we get distributable VMs for non-free OSes?
Not legally.
--
David Cantrell | Reality Engineer, Ministry of Information
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