Re: Your W3C-LinkChecker test reports

[David Golden]

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Chris 'BinGOs' Williams
<ch...@bingosnet.co.uk> wrote:
>
> In your test I see that you use '-T' switch which makes perl ignore PERL5LIB,
> hence the blarting about can't find LWP/RobotUA.pm in @INC.
>
> Now, I thought CPANPLUS ( which I smoke on ) and CPAN used the same mechanism
> during testing, so I'm going to copy this to the cpan-testers-discuss mailing 
> list
> for any further comments.

CPAN.pm does use the same mechanism, but often, CPAN.pm based smokers
have LWP installed already.

More generally, this line in the test file will be a problem for
anyone that uses PERL5LIB, not just smoke testers.

    ok(system($^X, '-wTc', File::Spec->catfile('bin', 'checklink')) == 0);

For example, if I'm on a hosted platform, and I use the system perl,
but have CPAN.pm set to install my own additions into ~/myperl/ using
PREFIX or INSTALL_BASE, and I set PERL5LIB to that directory, then
even if I satisfy the LWP dependency, it's installed into a directory
that can't be found under taint mode and would fail this test.  Thus,
it's really a bug in the test, not the smoker.

(And that's exactly why smoke testers come in handy -- testing
distributions under a wider range of situations and assumptions than
they were originally developed in.)

As a potential solution for the test file, you should look into how
Test::Harness handles test files.  In *.t files that call for taint
mode in the shebang line ("#!/usr/bin/perl -T"), Test::Harness
converts all the PERL5LIB entries into "-I" switches on the command
line when the *.t file is executed.  If you want to test 'checklink'
under taint via system(), that's probably a necessary step.  See the
source for TAP::Parser::Source::Perl for the code.

Regards,
David