use Perl

RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 is a deeply zany platform.

I've been discovering all sorts of unusual bugs in otherwise stable and mature modules.

For example, running prove.

Ignoring the failure for a second, I find it quite weird that the default readdir order is backwards.

[adamk@dev1web05 k2]$ K2_TEST_WWW=XXXXXXXXX prove -r t
t/www/02_login....NOK 7
# Failed test 'Page is loading'
# at t/www/02_login.t line 52.
# searched: "<html\x{0a}><head\x{0a}><meta content="text/html; charset=IS"...
# can't find: "Page is loading"
# Looks like you failed 1 test of 7.
t/www/02_login....dubious
                Test returned status 1 (wstat 256, 0x100)
DIED. FAILED test 7
                Failed 1/7 tests, 85.71% okay
t/www/01_index....ok
t/02_compile......ok
t/01_config.......ok
Failed Test Stat Wstat Total Fail Failed List of Failed
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
t/www/02_login.t 1 256 7 1 14.29% 7
Failed 1/4 test scripts, 75.00% okay. 1/18 subtests failed, 94.44% okay.


Test::Simple is a very mature and stable module, at the core of Perl's ability to run unit tests and a dependency for more of CPAN... except that it fails tests on RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.

...
t/skipall.................ok
t/sort_bug................dubious
                Test returned status 255 (wstat -1, 0xffffffff)
                after all the subtests completed successfully
t/tbt_01basic.............ok
t/tbt_02fhrestore.........ok
t/tbt_03die...............ok
t/tbt_04line_num..........ok
t/tbt_05faildiag..........ok
t/tbt_06errormess.........ok
t/tbt_07args..............ok
t/thread_taint............ok
t/threads.................dubious
                Test returned status 255 (wstat -1, 0xffffffff)
                after all the subtests completed successfully
t/todo....................ok ...


For some reason threads are making the apparent return value to be 255, even when the test script has an explicit exit(0) in it.

And then there's Scalar::Util. I'm not sure if this is a problem in other places without the compiled version of Scalar::Util, but it appears that the "blessed" function has problems with one of the more evil tests in Params::Util, causing tests to fail for Params::Util.

The relevant test statements are


my $false_obj2 = bless \do { my $i } => "\0";

is( _INVOCANT($false_obj2), 1, 'Null-class blessed object is an invocant' );


I'm sure there's more oddities hidden in here I haven't found yet, so the Adventure in Toolchain Zanyness will surely continue.

Whatever it is that this OS is tickling, I'd love to see it fixed, so if anybody has a legal license of RHEL 4 I think it would be VERY useful to get a CPAN Testers installation running on it.