Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Do you have CPAN::Reporter installed? Go do it!

Do you have CPAN::Reporter installed? Did you maybe not know what it is, what it does, and why it's the easiest way to help the perl+cpan community? CPAN::Reporter sends back test results every time you download a module from CPAN. This gives module authors something tangible to know that people are using their modules and to automatically report errors.
Now anyone with an up-to-date CPAN.pm can contribute to CPAN Testers -- no smoke server needed.
...
Becoming a CPAN Tester with CPAN::Reporter is easy. From the CPAN shell prompt:

cpan> install CPAN::Reporter
cpan> reload cpan
cpan> o conf init test_report
cpan> o conf commit

  --  http://use.perl.org/articles/06/11/08/1256207.shtml

My Hadoop::Streaming module has all sorts of crazy errors on esoteric platforms. I only know this because of automated smoke tests run by CPANTesters. It would be nice to have some reports from actual users mingled in with the automated runs.

In the latest release I pushed out over Independence Day weekend, I added monitoring on STDERR from my sub-command tests. Now I have some test results that capture error messages from external apps I try to run from my tests. At least now I have a chance of figuring them out... not sure I understand these error messages yet. Maybe they'll make more sense tomorrow. I'd like to make it so all my users see this output from cpan:


All tests successful.
Files=5, Tests=12, 2 wallclock secs ( 0.05 usr 0.00 sys + 2.04 cusr 0.20 csys = 2.29 CPU)
Result: PASS
(/usr/bin/make test exited with 0)
CPAN::Reporter: Test result is 'pass', All tests successful.
CPAN::Reporter: preparing a CPAN Testers report for Hadoop-Streaming-0.100270
CPAN::Reporter: sending test report with 'pass' to cpan-testers@perl.org

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