On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 2:24 PM, chromatic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ... but every time I see yet another arcane cantrip to add to my projects to
> work around brokenness in CPAN Testers clients, a little bit more of my
> motivation to care slips away.
You only need one and you'll never need to learn another:
exit if $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING};
> ... not just for CPAN Testers, but for actual users.
>
> Maybe CPAN Testers is too easy a target. Maybe the real blame lies elsewhere.
CPAN Testers is the lightning rod because it sits at the end of a
horrible antiquated toolchain that is not user friendly and where
every author has had the luxury to tell "actual users" about
dependency failures via a free-form console interface.
It's compounded by the original design that has a many-to-many
(testers-to-authors) approach to communication, which makes applying
any sort of quality standards or control next to impossible.
You seem to want to have CPAN Testers only send failure reports when
it's a *real* failure. That requires one of the following:
* Artificial Intelligence (or a sufficiently good regex replacement)
sufficient to read console output and and interpret it to your
criteria
* A structured way of specifying dependencies and a consistent way to
evaluate whether they are met
All the cantrips you hate are just different variations on the second
choice because there's no consensus for a single way to do it.
> Maybe it's nostalgia, but does anyone else miss the days when you could upload
> a new distribution to the CPAN and maybe someday get a couple of "Hey,
> thanks!" messages, rather than a whole pile of "Your stupid crappy software
> for jerks is broken, you toad!" messages...
<grin>You'd rather get spammed with all the PASS emails too?</grin>
-- David
