Fellow CPANtesters,
Greetings from the 2017 Perl 5 Core Hackathon in Amsterdam! I am
writing to you as a follow-up to a discussion which participants had
this afternoon entitled "What Do We Want and Need from Smoke Testing?"
(https://github.com/p5h/2017/wiki/What-Do-We-Want-and-Need-from-Smoke-Testing)
One of the issues raised in the discussion was the extent to which we
can do more to locate and address failures in tests of CPAN libraries
due to changes in Perl 5 blead.
Such failures are often referred to in the Perl 5 Porters world as "BBC"
tickets -- where BBC means "Blead Breaks CPAN". You probably know of
the tremendous work which Andreas Koenig and Slaven Rezić have done for
years in this area. We value those efforts but were wondering if the
CPANtesters infrastructure could be leveraged to provide new access to
BBC data.
Specifically, the following question:
Would it be possible to generate a monthly report from data in the
CPANtesters database(s), identifying all CPAN libraries:
(i) which had not had a new version uploaded to CPAN in the past month; but
(ii) which had experienced new breakage in their test suites in the past
month -- breakage which could hypothetically be attributed to a change
in the Perl 5 source code from one monthly development release to the next?
I realize that that question is probably not yet precise enough to be
translated into a database query. However, we welcome your insights
into how CPANtesters data can be leveraged for the benefit of better
Perl 5 core development.
Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan
