25. Controlling test suite runs Proposal:
The META spec should add flags to indicate that distribution's tests may be shuffled or run in parallel. (SlavenRezic) Comments: * The prove utility provides the interesting options --shuffle and --jobs. With --shuffle the test suite is not run in alphabetic but random order. With --jobs multiple test scripts run in parallel. This could speed up testing, especially on multi-processor machines. * Unfortunately authors may write their test suites that neither one or the other option may be used: authors may have some "initialization" and "cleanup" script in the test suite (so shuffle cannot be used), or may use a file or other resource in many test scripts (so parallel runs cannot be used). So we cannot assume that --shuffle and --jobs may be used by default. * A sample definition could look like this (please think of better key names): test_run: may_be_shuffled: yes may_run_in_parallel: yes Maybe even a control file to manage chunks/blocks that the module authors already set up (Tux). test_conf_file: t/t_conf * I quite like this idea in principle, mostly because I've never seen a better suggestion for how the Makefile.PL or Build.PL could make parallel testing work. That said, it seems like it SHOULD be possible to make this happen without having to go via metadata (which is for the configuration to communicate to the CPAN client). Could the CPAN client really do anything about this? --Adam K