Marcus,
... And I still think that your test reports are "wrong" in the way that
Test reports are not wrong if they accurately reflect what happens what
happens on the system. If there's no C compiler, and the tests fail,
then the report should show that.
A "problem" is that CPANPLUS is not yet sophisticated to recognize this
and do what it should, which is to not send a report. Or maybe
CPANPLUS, MakeMaker, etc. should recognize that the module requires a C
compiler and refuse to try and build it in the first place.
Or maybe the CPAN::WWW::Testers software can be updated to differentiate
failure reports due to missing compilers from other kinds of failures.
a) the source of the failure it isn't obvious by looking at the report,
unless you're fluent in Chinese, and
I can't read Chinese and could figure it out:
> > Microsoft (R) Program Maintenance Utility Version 1.50
> > Copyright (c) Microsoft Corp 1988-94. All rights reserved.
> >
> > 'cl' ���O�����Υ~���R�O�B
> > �i���檺�{���Χ妸�ɡC
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> > NMAKE : fatal error U1077: 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe' : return
code '0x1'
> > Stop.
and so what if it's in Chinese?
Maybe in the future the testing system will be sophisticated enough to
read meta-data and know to send test reports in multiple languages (the
author's and tester's).
b) rarely anyone ever looks at the detailed reports; they browse CPAN
search, they see failure on Windows, they assume the modules doesn't
work on Windows.
Anyone who uses test reports to determine whether a module works or not
on their platform would look at the failure reports.
CPAN "visitors" should have a minimum technical ability to decipher
failure reports. If they are evaluating a module that may suit their
needs, presumably they would not superficially ignore it just because it
failed in some test reports.
There are many types of failure reports, and often for reasons beyond
the author's control.
Accept that failures (and even strange unknown and na reports) happen.
3) You install a compiler on your machine, or you stop that specific
smoke. There are already a couple of people who have set up
Windows smoke boxes. And your other smoke setups are fine, so
this suggestion really isn't meant offensive.
So "visitors" would see that your module works on some Windows
platforms, and not be too worried about failures.
We need platforms without compilers to run tests, so that code which
recognizes that there is no compiler and acts accordingly can be tested!
I agree 100% with imacat here:
I'm providing my CPU, my harddisk, my bandwidth, my
time to help testing tens of new packages everyday.
This is a volunteer effort. People are trying to contribute to the
community, and they get little back for it. If they get criticised for
trying to help out, then they'll stop helping out.
If you don't like what's happening, do something contructive like submit
patches to ExtUtils::MakeMaker and Module::Build, CPANPLUS,
Test::Reporter, CPAN::YACSmoke or CPAN::WWW::Testers to minimize failure
reports like this one.
Regards,
Rob
