David Golden wrote:
We periodically have authors complain that they don't want any reports
or don't want certain modules tested.
Usually when they grumble about particular distributions being tested
it's because a tester has gone and tested something hideously ancient.
> I think I've seen that various
smoke testers maintain their own custom skip logic. Would it make
sense to agree on a file format and put a joint list in some joint
subversion repository?
Yes (although being old-sk00l I'd prefer CVS), and ...
E.g.
# cpan-testers.skipfile.yml
authors:
- CRANKY
- UNCLE
dists:
- Acme-.*
- Ancient-Distro-Shouldnt-Be-Tested
YAML is a nice format, as it'll be dead easy to transform into the CPAN
distribution preferences Data::Dumper files that I use for preventing
certain modules and authors from being tested.
It we put it somewhere with easy access for CPAN authors, then we
could maintain it jointly or authors could add themselves to it, etc.
I was thinking of Alias' open repository as a reasonable place to put
it since he hands out access pretty freely to CPAN authors (based on
their CPAN author ID).
What do people think?
Do it.
A danger, however, is that if we were to all suddenly start skipping
everything by author FOOBAR then the normal way to do that would be to
just not download his modules. That means that anything that depends on
his modules would also not get tested. Which is bad. It would be nice
to come up with a mechanism that would only affect the sending of test
reports - so then testers would still download my stuff if something
else depends on it, but just not bug FOOBAR with failure reports. If
CPAN::Reporter and YACSmoke could share the same 'blacklist' file that
would be awesome.
YAML, BTW, while a great format for us humans to update, is probably not
the best one to use while actually running tests. To read it requires
the YAML module, and I like to test on a bare-bones perl, which doesn't
have YAML. But I can easily turn YAML into perl code using
Data::Dumper, so please please please support that as well, like Andreas
does for distribution prefs files.
--
David Cantrell | Official London Perl Mongers Bad Influence
Wow, my first sigquoting! I feel so special now!
-- Dan Sugalski
