Nigel Horne wrote:
Is there something we can do about unsupported CPAN Modules, for example
HTML::FormatData? That module hasn't been updated since 2005, and it's
not because it works and needs no updating, because it doesn't work.
There are plenty of old modules like that out there.
Can we bring pressure to bear on the CPAN maintainers? For example, if a
module results in FAIL or UNKNOWN on at least 50% (choose another figure
if you want) of tested platforms then:
Don't forget that CPAN testers is full of false negatives.
It is designed to handle the most common case where a module is compiled
and tested just running make && make install (or the Module::Build
equivalent) but this is not always the case.
There are modules that have further requirements as 3th party libraries
or software, accessing some network service, X-Window, having some
environment variable set, etc. A module can even use some foreign build
framework as GNU autoconf/automake.
If you look at http://stats.cpantesters.org/wpcent.html with care, you
will see that a relatively high proportion of the modules there are well
maintained but that they have some special requirement that the testers
are not fulfilling.
So, please, don't use the CPAN testers results to generate quality
metrics and even less to take actions based on them.
IMO, the current approach that lets the user explore the raw data in a
nice and friendly way is the right thing to do. Don't go further ;-)
- Salva
