Salve J Nilsen wrote:
Bug #1: The module build output text is too verbose. (Hiding the detailed
output would be useful.)
It certainly is, especially when there's XS things being built. The
vast majority of the time all you're interested in is failures, no-one
cares that yet another file compiled just fine, or what weird
incantation was needed to make that happen. Nor do normal people care
about what files were extracted from the tarball, where they were copied
to, and so on. In fact, all I usually care about is:
what dependencies have been found;
the test results
Bug #4: There isn't a sufficiently clear test output summary telling Joe
which
module broke the dependency chain - so he can't look into it
himself.
(Visualizing the dependencies and show where it broke may help.
Maybe
displaying the relevant dependencies in a way like tree(1) does?)
That would be very useful, both for non-perl people installing stuff,
and also for authors, especially if the CPAN testers were to send that
stuff to people whose modules don't get tested because of pre-requisites
that failed.
I hope you don't mind, but I've just posted to cpan-testers about this,
quoting you.
Bug #5: There's no simple way available Joe to report/post the failed
test to someone who cares. (It may help asking if the test failures
should be reported, possibly resulting in the installation of
Test::Reporter and it picking up the previous Build.log files)
CPAN::Reporter makes this easy. [author CCed]
But for this to work, one has to lower the "barrier of entry" for giving
feedback, and up the quality of the base level of feedback offered.
Are you suggesting that some kind of test reporting mechanism should be
core in 5.10? It's a nice idea - it's one of very *very* few things
that I'd not object to having added to the core.
Additionally, it's fallacious to assume that authors are either
helpful, proactive, competant, or even (unfortunately in some cases)
alive.
This is true, and I'm actually assuming that the authors ARE all these
things (or at the very least _wants_ to be these things.)
Many authors *are* helpful, proactive, competent and alive. That
includes most of the authors of the most important modules that I've
reported failures in. Sadly, a lot of authors seem to be indifferent
based on how I keep seeing the same failures again and again and again
while smoke-testing CPAN. Only a tiny minority of authors are
deliberately unhelpful, or are incompetent or dead.
Would it make sense to find a way to make it easier to "take over"
projects that are obviosly standing still?
It's already easy, and there were some mumblings on another perly list
recently (module-authors, IIRC) about documenting it better so it stops
appearing to be hard.
--
David Cantrell
