On Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 05:51:39PM -0700, cr...@animalhead.com wrote:
> Last February I submitted a module to CPAN. Version 0.54 got 16 PASSes,
> 4 FAILS, and 128 UNKNOWNs. The UNKNOWNs were for 2 reasons:
>
> ...
>
> One of the testers suggested I use Devel::CheckLib to
> communicate the need for the C library.
Devel::CheckLib is a way of communicating *to the build toolchain* that
there's a dependency on a C library. If the dependency isn't met, the
toolchain knows to not send a bogus fail/unknown report, just like it
wouldn't if a perl module that you depend on failed its tests and wasn't
installed.
Basically, it tries to solve the "you sent a test failure when you've
got a missing dependency YOU IDIOT BURN IN HELL" problem :-)
Most CPAN-testers' smoke testing setups are entirely automated and they
won't see any prompts about downloading and building libraries. But
I'll add building it to my rather long to-do list ;-)
--
David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig
The Law of Daves: in any gathering of technical people, the
number of Daves will be greater than the number of women.
