On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 10:30:05PM +0100, nadim khemir wrote: > Hi, although I greatly appreciate the provided service (cpan smoking) it has > the disadvantage to give the result long after I need it which is before I > release to CPAN. > > I would like to see the possibility to run smoke tests as part of my pre- > release tests. I see no reason to release a module if it doesn't work on a > specific platform or at least I'd like to list that platform as unsupported. > Although most often the errors are simply found because the test smoking > machines have a different setup.
One option here is to release a "development version", ie with an _ in the version number, this will be tested by most CPAN testers, but won't be installed by either of the CPAN clients unless the user explicitly requests that version. I've used that to test changes to Imager and POE::XS::Queue::Array that I thought might have portability issues. > I also believe that the smoke test platforms should be available, on a > cpan/perl/smoke test related site, as virtual machines when possible. This > would lower the demand on the smoke test infrastructure. There are VMs > available for download, IE on the OsZoo site, but those differ from the > "official" smoke boxes. > > Running smoke tests in VMs would have the added advantage to add redundancy > to > the smoking infrastructure. If the VMs are allowed to change and be reported > back as "official " smoke machines, that would allow for more smoke testing > environment. > > I remember we've had this very discussion at a YAPC, is there still interest > for it? What do we need to get this working? Can we get distributable VMs for > non-free OSes? There was PITA (http://www.pitatesting.org/) but I haven't heard of any recent activity on this. Tony
