Hello, everyone.
I've just added a new 'command_timeout' advanced config option to
CPAN::Reporter. This works like CPAN's 'inactivity_timeout' -- it
kills anything run through CPAN::Reporter's record_command() function
after that many seconds. I see this as handy for any sort of
unattended testing to prevent having a smoker hang up for hours
because someone wrote a custom prompt or interactive test and didn't
check for $ENV{AUTOMATED_TEST}, etc.
However, I'd like to get some consensus on how interrupted commands
should be graded. I should be able to detect that the process died
with an alarm signal, but frankly, I'd like a wider interpretation for
any process that dies from a signal -- where $? & 127 is true.
Options:
(1) DISCARD -- just throw it away as junk
(2) UNKNOWN -- indicating that something weird/inconclusive happened
I think that (1) is safer -- where 'safe' means less noise about false
positives -- but then what should we do in the case when someone
intentionally hits CTRL-C because something has gotten hung up? I.e.
a live testers, not an automated tester. Maybe that should trigger
the opportunity for a valid report of some kind rather than just
discarding the event entirely. So I'm leaning slightly towards (2),
which gives a tester an opportunity to choose to send a report or not.
And for any other signal death (not from the live tester) it says
that something went wrong, but isn't as damning as a FAIL.
I suppose a third option is to do (1) if $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING} is
set and (2) if it isn't.
What do people think?
David
