SKIP might be a good idea to avoid running tests that cannot work due to some missing prereq or bad environment or whatever but it still does not solve the reporting problem.
There can be calls like this ok($ok, "environment is ready"); and calls like this ok($ok, "system under test works well"); So far people only gave suggestions but IMHO non from experience. So does that mean others are not interested in separate reporting of "thing is broken" vs "could not even execute test" or did I phrase my question incorrectly ? This might be a conceptual question as well maybe. In a CPAN module it might not be a big issue. e.g in a database related module if the user who is installing the module did not provide the necessary connection information we can just skip the tests. In my situation the test execution and its result is the product, this is done in a QA department. People in the department seem to want clear separation of "the environment is broken, could not execute some of the tests" and "the product is broken, ring the alarm bells". So how do others do that? Gabor
