A new File::Copy::Recursive has been released -- has the threat now passed?
On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 7:25 PM, James E Keenan <jkee...@pobox.com> wrote: > This message is intended for people working on the Perl toolchain and, in > particular, for attendees at the Perl Toolchain Summit starting tomorrow in > Oslo. > > The test-against-dev work I have been conducting for several months has > identified at least one CPAN distro, high up in the toolchain, which is > broken on non-Linux operating systems. The reasons for this breakage are > sub-optimal code in modules or test suites, not "Blead Breaks CPAN." Such > breakage prevents the distro from being installed and means that its > revdeps are never reached during the following cases: > > * Installation via 'cpan' shell: Distro fails and is graded as FAIL and > reported to metabase. Assuming on 'force install' is attempted on distro, > revdep is graded as DISCARD and no report is sent to metabase or to > revdep's maintainers. > > * Installation via 'cpanm': Distro fails and is graded as FAIL. Revdep > is not attempted and is not graded anywhere. You have to examine build.log > for messages reporting "Bailing out ...." No report is sent to metabase or > to maintainers. > > * Because test-against-dev relies on 'cpanm', if a distro in, say, the top > 1000 of the CPAN river fails, its revdeps are never reached, meaning their > code does not get exercised against the latest monthly development release. > > The CPAN distro of greatest concern right now is File-Copy-Recursive( > http://search.cpan.org/~dmuey/File-Copy-Recursive-0.40/), currently > ranked about #128 in the CPAN river. On FreeBSD (and perhaps other OSes), > FCR's current version (0.40 as of Apr 17 2018) has an unfixed bug ( > https://rt.cpan.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=123964) leading to test > failures and failure to install. Unless a user chooses to '--force' > install FCR, that prevents its revdeps from being installed in an automated > manner or tested against dev/blead. > > Over 6000 CPAN distributions have direct or indirect dependencies on FCR, > including CPAN-Reporter, Test-File-ShareDir, DateTime, Dist-Zilla and > Catalyst-Devel. So thousands of CPAN distros cannot be installed on > FreeBSD and other systems. > > The author of FCR is aware of the bug ticket and Tom Hukins provided a > patch which I have tested successfully on FreeBSD. But the patch has not > been applied as of yesterday. As we are now in the countdown to > perl-5.28.0, we really need to be able to assess the impact of release > candidates on CPAN -- and not just on Linux. > > Earlier this week I wanted to resume sending CPANtesters reports from > FreeBSD-11.1. I tried to install CPAN-Reporter but could not, due to the > bug in its dependency, FCR. To address that I have uploaded to CPAN a new > CPAN distro, File-Copy-Recursive-Reduced (FCR2), which provides > stripped-down versions of 2 FCR subroutines, fcopy() and dircopy(), which > are used in the CPAN-Reporter test suite. I then branched CPAN-Reporter to > create a version which uses the FCR2 versions of these functions rather > than FCR. That makes CPAN-Reporter installable again. I have therefore > filed: > > https://github.com/cpan-testers/CPAN-Reporter/issues/88 > and > https://github.com/cpan-testers/CPAN-Reporter/pull/90 (a better p.r. than > my earlier /89) > > I hope that during the PTS you can review and apply this p.r. and upload a > new version of CPAN-Reporter. This will once again permit automated > installation on FreeBSD and other non-Linux operating systems. It will > also help us to assess perl-5.28's possible impact on that distro and its > revdeps. > > Thank you very much. > Jim Keenan >
