Hello CPAN testers,
About a month ago I asked on the CPAN authors list why my module
IPC::MMA wasn't getting more test reports, despite the fact that I
had reworked its Makefile.PL to output a message about the need for a
required C library that I don't have the right to include with
IPC::MMA. David Golden sent a nice response:
Most automated smoke testing will just quietly exit and continue.
The testers will never see the prompt. This is generally how
automated testers like it (though there are exceptions). Stopping
at every Nth module to figure out how to resolve someone's custom
dependency takes extra time that donating some CPU cycles to the
testing effort does not.
NOTE --> "exit 0" means that *no* report is sent. Not even an
UNKNOWN. This is just like what happens with Perl prerequisites.
If a prerequisite can't be satisfied, then no report is sent.
I think the most effective thing that will lead to more test
reports is asking people to install libmm. That's best done via
personal appeal on the cpan-testers-discuss or on #cpantesters-
discuss on irc.perl.org. That means work for someone who maintains
multiple virtual machines, so ask nicely. ;-)
Asking nicely is something I don't have much experience with, but
this is my attempt.
The mm library, which is a non-CPAN prerequisite for IPC::MMA, is
quite easy to download and install from http://www.ossp.org/pkg/lib/mm/
Almost certainly, none of you will have any problem with downloading
and installing mm. mm only applies to Unix/Linux systems, so Windows-
based testers should ignore this message.
A few days from now I will upload a new IPC::MMA 0.58001, that will
be available to your test systems in the near future. The main
change is that it uses /dev/urandom rather than /dev/random for
testing, so that it should run its tests faster than previous versions.
So, might it be possible that you could please find time sometime in
your busy schedule to install the mm library on your test system(s)?
Historically only two testers have had mm on their systems, now 3
including David Golden.
One or two residual problems remain with the current 0.58, that may
or not be the fault of my module.
If you could please install mm, the test results would be very
helpful to provide additional data on these.
Thank you very much,
Craig MacKenna
Los Gatos, CA
