On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 01:02:16AM +0100, Barbie wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 10:25:46AM -0700, chromatic wrote:
> > Let me change directions and ask a philosophical question. I suspect the
> > answer will be revealing.
> > Is the purpose of CPAN Testers to report whether a distribution will install
> > on a given machine or whether its tests pass on a given platform?
I'm interested in whether a distribution *works* on a given platform.
I'm interested as a module author and as a module user, and as a
consequence of that I'm interested as a tester.
Without writing code to use it, the closest I can come is to see if it
builds and passes its tests. So, my answer is both, as passing the
tests is part of seeing if it will install which is part of seeing if it
works.
I'm deliberately ignoring 'force install' here.
> Part of the purpose for CPAN Testers is to try and indicate whether a
> particular distribution can pass with a given platform/perl, but more
> specifically what versions pass with that given platform/perl. In some
> cases the latest version fails, but an earlier version passes.
Something on p5p today gave me a *really* interesting idea - use
cpan-testers results to create a CPAN index that contains the latest
version of every distribution that works on a given version of perl.
Run a CPAN "mirror" that serves up those index files but proxies all
other requests through to a real CPAN mirror. That way, when someone
using, say, perl 5.6.2 tries to install Foo::Bar which depends on DBI,
he'll get a version of DBI that works on his perl, rather than the CPAN
client downloading the latest DBI which then fails its tests.
The existence of such a service would, incidentally, free authors from
the burden of maintaining their code on old versions of perl, as it
would be trivial for a user to find and use the older version that
doesn't use 'our' or the smart match wossname or whatever.
I've added this to my lengthy to-do list.
--
David Cantrell | London Perl Mongers Deputy Chief Heretic
23.5 degrees of axial tilt is the reason for the season
