Tim Bunce wrote:
I was recently lamenting, on dbi-dev mailing list, the poor coverage of
cpantesters, re a recent DBI trial release:
http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=DBI+1.617_903
Martin Evans [CC'd] said:
On the Windows smokers question, I tried that a few years ago and
found it a PITA eventually bringing my machine to a stand still. To be
honest I found smoke testing on Linux/AIX/Solaris a PITA too but just
not as much as Windows. Too many modules prompt even under smoke
testing or have incorrect dependencies so my exclusion list just kept
growing and growing. I just looked and I have 32263 smoke reports but
you've no idea what problems were caused generating them and I
eventually gave up - I really don't know how bingos (Chris Williams)
etc manage to generate so many. Personally, I'd change cpan shell to
send installation results by default but I don't really understand the
complexities of this (even if they were anonymous).
Have things improved?
Smoking on Windows is more problematic because it takes more resources, and crashes stop smoking process because you
have to click on popup window to terminate it.
Some modules are very dirty because they try to write something to /tmp/ or even / (I hadn't much luck to track them
down) and don't clean up after themselves (this is a problem on Linux too, as too many modules leave their crap in home
directory, but at least they don't pollute EVERYTHING).
Other than that, smoking on Windows is not that horrible. I've stopped running smokers on Windows because I have only
one Windows machine right now (which I use to play games, hehe), but I think I will resume smoke testing on it.
I have a distropref file to skip problematic modules on Windows, feel free to use it:
http://svn.trouchelle.com/perl/cpan/prefs/_stro_win32.yml
--
S.T.
