use Perl

Published over at blogs.perl.org

Published over at blogs.perl.org

As mentioned in Dave Golden's journal I have hacked up a revised version of CPANPLUS::Dist::Build and uploaded to CPAN.

Happy, happy, joy, joy.

For a while now CPANPLUS has shipped with a very cool feature called cpanp-boxed

cpanp-boxed will let an individual use CPANPLUS from it's distribution directory without having to install it or to use CPANPLUS to boot-strap install itself and it's dependencies.

I think this is rather groovey

$ wget http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/K/KA/KANE/CPANPLUS-0.84.tar.gz

$ tar zxf CPANPLUS-0.84.tar.gz && rm CPANPLUS-0.84.tar.gz && cd CPANPLUS-0.84/

$ perl bin/cpanp-boxed

CPANPLUS::Shell::Default -- CPAN exploration and module installation (v0.84)
*** Please report bugs to <bug-cpanplus@rt.cpan.org>.
*** Using CPANPLUS::Backend v0.84.  ReadLine support disabled.

*** Type 'p' now to show start up log

Did you know...
    Many operations take options, like '--verbose', '--force' or '--skiptest'
CPAN Terminal> s conf cpantest 1; s conf email bingos@cpan.org

CPAN Terminal> i YAML::Tiny; i Test::Reporter; s selfupdate dependencies; i CPANPLUS

And there you have it, cpanp-boxed will boot-strap install all it's dependencies and itself and submit CPAN Test reports as it goes along.

Of course, you can just use cpanp-boxed as is to install any module you want without having to install it.

There is a developer release of CPANPLUS::YACSmoke available on CPAN. If you are a CPAN Tester using CPANPLUS to smoke test then can you give it a go.

It has been tested against both the current release 0.84 and current development release 0.85_04 of CPANPLUS without any problems

The big improvement in this release is to CPANPLUS::Dist::YACSmoke, the CPANPLUS distribution class that integrates CPAN testing services into CPANPLUS, which now will trust the build directory for a distribution if it has previously been prepared, built and tested successfully.

This feature gives a considerable boost to the speed of CPAN smoke testing and brings to CPANPLUS based smoke testing functionality that CPAN/CPAN::Reporter have had for a while now.

There is still an issue with fetching and extraction of distributions and a patch to resolve this issue has been upstreamed to CPANPLUS.

Playing with WWW::UsePerl::Journal

If this works, then I'll start posting more regularly.

Subject pretty much says it all. My MX and the perl.org MX have had a falling out. Now all I get is this:

[canker:~]$ telnet mx.develooper.com 25
Trying 63.251.223.176...
Connected to mx.develooper.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
451 Sorry, too many connections from <censored>, try again later
Connection closed by foreign host.
[canker:~]$

Can't find anyone to fix it. Too tired to wait around for it to fix itself.

So the smokers have had their plugs pulled.

So I finally got around to tearing down and rebuilding all the CPAN smokers that I have on my NetBSD 3.1 box.

This is a smoker that pretty much runs unattended, getting new CPAN updates via RSS

As it had been running a long while the perl installations had picked up cruft along the way. Module::Build based distributions had for example installed M::B via the Module::Build::Compat passthrough Makefile.PL. I also noticed that some pesky distribution has managed to install LWP in a similiar fashion. Not good.

It too me two days of work to build, install and configure 10 separate perls. So I wasn't looking forward to pesky CPAN authors adding cruft to my prestine smokers.

Then it hit me. Lets separate out the CPANPLUS configuration/build directories from the perl installation directories and then chown the perl installation directories to root. Oh, yes, that would work indeedy.

So I have.

-bash-3.2$ ls -l rel
total 44
drwxr-xr-x  12 cpan  users  512 Sep 30 16:30 conf
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.10.0
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.6.2
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.1
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.2
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.3
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.4
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.5
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.6
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.7
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.8
-bash-3.2$

Other noteworthy stuff that I did during the rebuilds:

• Module::Build 0.30 is installed in all the smokers now
• CPANPLUS::Dist::Build is installed in all the smokers, this is the patched version from svn which includes a fix for capturing the output from Build and Build test phases
• All toolchain modules such as ExtUtils::MakeMaker are fully up to date

I am rolling these changes in working practises across all my smokers as they come up in the rotation

I run a few smokers that use the RSS recent uploads feed from search.cpan.org

These have been happily running years without problems until a couple of days ago.

Now I am seeing:

[search-cpan-recent] [!!] Failed to parse RSS XML: reference to invalid character number at line 580, column 58, byte 28109 at /Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/XML/Parser.pm line 187

WTF.

So who is to blame.

I start trailing backwards through the twisted dependencies to how I got here.

So, I'm using POE::Component::RSSAggregator, which is using XML::RSS::Feed, which is using XML::RSS, which is using XML::Parser. Nothing obviously wrong anywhere there.

Okay, let's look at the actual RDF file.

Aha. On the line 580 of that we have a
character. Which leads me to here.

So now I am bashing my head of the keyboard, cursing.

Pesky edge cases.

Update: I reported the problem and Graham has swiftly resolved the issue. Many thanks, Graham.

Well, I'm changing the email address that CPAN test reports will be coming from.

It is currently the same as what appears on CPAN, but what with the changes to CPAN Testers and the fact that the web-based mailing list strips the email address down to just chris, I thought it was about time to switch to my CPAN address, bingos@cpan.org, which gets shortened to bingos and hey there is a dude on CPAN and IRC with that id.