On Mon, Feb 04, 2013 at 09:16:40AM -0800, Marvin Humphrey wrote: > On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 8:59 AM, David Cantrell <da...@cantrell.org.uk> wrote: > > And the mount options won't tell you whether your NFS volume is > > backed by something sensible like UFS or ext4, or whether the admin has > > done something crazy like export a FAT filesystem or re-export something > > from Samba. This is important if you want to know things like whether > > hard links are supported, or whether it is case-sensitive vs > > case-preserving vs case-smashing. > Say that your CPAN module depends on one of those features, e.g. hard linking. > When a CPAN tester runs your module's test suite on a file system where hard > linking is not supported, what should happen? Once testing is underway, the > only options are to either A) fail or B) skip, possibly obscuring true > failures. > > Is hard linking not a legitimate use case in the judgment of CPAN testers > because it is not sufficiently portable?
Testers are happy to test modules that are specific to weird legacy proprietary OSes, so portability isn't a problem for us. We merely encourage people to declare their non-portability in advance. > Is it the responsibility of module > authors to "fix" their distributions to accommodate the lowest common > denominator of file system features? No, I think it's authors' responsibility, if they don't want to fall foul of the tester running the wrong OS or whatever, to declare their pre-requisites, and, if they forget to declare some of them, to be prepared to put up with the occasional test failure report. For something that is so rarely a problem as working hard links, I'd be inclined to not care, no matter whether I'm wearing my testing hat or my author hat, until it becomes a problem for me. As it happens, I do have one project that depends on working hard links, and when it gets to the stage where that matters to my tests, I'll do something about it, and if I'm feeling generous I'll do it in such a way that others can add their own filesystem capability checks. -- David Cantrell | London Perl Mongers Deputy Chief Heretic Graecum est; non legitur
