Since having set up my Windows smoker again i've been seeing a lot of failures that quite simply ARE failures, but aren't caught and reported. My smoker is set up to restart from the top of the list quite frequently, to ensure that newly uploaded dists are also being smoked. This combines with the previous issue to the situation that the smoker continually tries to smoke dists that result in failures, since it doesn't catch, report and store a failure to know that it can skip next time.
Some failure modes i've seen that cause this: - trying to unpack an archive for which no packer is available on the system - trying to unpack an archive that contains characters that cannot be used in paths on the system - invalid yml/json files - circular dependencies I've been contacting authors whose dists exhibit such issues and they've been happy to hear about the issues and also happy to resolve them. However it is very slow going and i wish to automate it. The best way i can think of would be to modify CPAN::Reporter to catch these and report them as "PL FAIL". I plan to do this in a fork of CPAN::Reporter i am running on my own system for now. Does anyone have thoughts or objections to any of this? -- With regards, Christian Walde
