On Thursday 04 September 2008 11:30:51 David Golden wrote: > It shouldn't be any big deal to report a failure -- once -- to an > author. That's just the normal bug-report cycle as an author might > get from any human user. Author can look into it (if they care to), > decide if it's a legitimate bug of theirs or if it's upstream. In > some cases "upstream" is the toolchain. In other cases, it's > dependencies.
I can live with occasionally having to triage tricky reports which may need resolution elsewhere, provided that: * CPAN Testers clients filter out the most common cases of toolchain misconfiguration (in progress, probably will require ongoing maintenance) * Duplicate reports get filtered out (in planning) * CPAN Testers appear to have done some triaging of failures on their own (at least reading the report and deciding if it's appropriate to send to the author before sending it) These would make the process more worthwhile to me. I only speak for myself here, of course, and you're well within your rights to ignore my suggestions or desires here. > That said, it should still be responsibility of testers to ensure they > have a reasonably sane configuration that could potentially be > successful at building and testing a distribution. It does very > little good to have a broken CPAN that causes "Build -j3" errors -- no > Build.PL could ever succeed and so the fact that a Build.PL dist > failed isn't telling us anything valuable about the distribution. Yes! That's the philosophy I want applied to all sorts of tests. Does this test tell me anything valuable? Does this test tell me anything actionable? Is that information worth the cost of the test? (Don't worry; this is not a problem specific to CPAN Testers. I see it in plenty of test suites, all the time.) -- c
