Re: CPAN Test Data

[Adam Turoff]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 03:27:56PM -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
> Is the data used for testers.cpan.org available anywhere in one 
> comprehensive chunk?
> 
> I looked around testers.cpan.org, and from what I can tell, it's
> only available in a pre-digested report format.  Surely it's
> reconstructable from the cpan-testers archive, but anywhere else?

Allow me to clarify -- I'm interested in hacking the cpan-testers data.
This will most likely lead to a facelift for testers.cpan.org.  :-)

Graham asked me to discuss the changes I'd like to see with the 
testers site.  Here's what I have in mind:

  - Provide a downloadable version of the test database (generated 
periodically, much like http://dmoz.org/rdf).  

  - Provide summaries by module of the entire test history for
that module in a single file:
  - module version tested
  - Perl version tested (perl -V output, and parsed configuration)
  - OS (+platform) tested

  - Provide brief summaries of what modules have been tested by
Perl release

  - Provide cross-reference pass/fail reports based on Perl configuration
option and release

  - Output should be available in multiple formats: XML, Text, and
if this does wind up being a facelift for testers.perl.org, HTML.  :-)
  
Yes, this is a lot of work, and many of the test values simply aren't
in the database yet.  It's pretty much an idea to smoke test CPAN with
various major releases (and future releases) of perl, including 5.8 
and 6.0.

Ideally, a rich API layer could be added on top of testers.cpan.org,
so that an install client (CPAN.pm) can provide relevant test information
to a user before a module is installed.  Maintaining a local copy 
of the (relevant) test data could help smoke-test clients burn through
a local CPAN mirror and torture test CPAN.

Thoughts?  Anyone have any other ideas?

Z.

CPAN Test Data

[Adam Turoff]

Is the data used for testers.cpan.org available anywhere in one 
comprehensive chunk?

I looked around testers.cpan.org, and from what I can tell, it's
only available in a pre-digested report format.  Surely it's
reconstructable from the cpan-testers archive, but anywhere else?

Thanks,

Z.

Re: QA-esque summary of TPC

[Adam Turoff]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2001 at 05:16:32PM -0400, Bryan C . Warnock wrote:
> I didn't have a good solution for tables, mainly because I didn't like a 
> tab, comma, or pipe separated solution.  (Which isn't intended as commentary 
> on Ziggy.)

Well, a significant portion of what I was working on (50%?) was tables.

The surprising thing is that the simple solution to tables seems like it
solves 80% of the problem with 20% of the complexity.  While that may
be the case, that 20% complexity is still pretty high, or the 80% isn't
as big as I thought.  When getting into large, multi-row tables, tabs
fall down (and commas get in the way).  Spanning multiple lines per row 
may help, but it gets very difficult to see exactly how long *one* row
is.

Anyway, this discussion, although interesting, is tangentially related
to QA at best.  I got a good response to the ideas behind the paper
at the conference, and I hope to have some modules on CPAN by the end
of the month.  The next step is to figure out a QA-ish tagset that can
be embedded (and ignored for document preparation).

Z.