use Perl

For the past few months Robert and I have been hard at work on CPAN::YACSmoke. As Robert was the original instigator for the idea, it's been his baby to upload to CPAN. However, as I've increasingly expanded the functionality and fixed bugs (mostly mine ;)), the patches I've been sending have been getting bigger and bigger and much more frequent. As such we decided that we needed a code repository somewhere, where we both could check-in patches. The obvious choice was SourceForge. So as of yesterday, Robert created a brand new project....

yacsmoke

We haven't designed a homepage or anything yet, and Robert has only just checked in all the code. We still intend for all the bugs/wishlists to be reported via rt, so if you have any suggestions please log them there.

For those wondering what CPAN::YACSmoke is, it a very resourceful front end to CPANPLUS for cpan-testing. Aside from the usual testing, that was previously handled by cpansmoke, it also allows the tester to manage what they test better. With cpansmoke you had to manually configure a list to test, unless you wrote your own smart script. With CPAN::YACSmoke the plugins allow you choose from several sources for the current list of distributions to test. As this list could contain many distributions that may not work on your OS, you can compile an excluded list, which filters out the difficult distros (such as ones requiring external libraries that aren't installed).

Each test then produces a grade. Four grades map directly to reports (NA, UNKNOWN, FAIL and PASS), but there are additional ones that don't produce reports (IGNORE, UNGRADED, ABORTED and NONE). Currently the lines are a bit blurred between UNGRADED and ABORTED in the code, but we know what they are *supposed* to represent :)

NA

Distribution is Not Applicable to this Operating System.

UNKNOWN

No test suit available to perform testing.

FAIL

Testing failed, details in report.

PASS

Testing passed.

IGNORE

A latter version of the distribution has already been tested. Testing not required.

UNGRADED

Testing was attempted, but there were issues outside of the distributions control, e.g. out-of-memory and Crtl-C type problems. Retest candidate.

ABORTED

Testing was attempted, but an issue surrounding the environment caused a problem. This could relate to missing external libraries or failing pre-requisites. Retest candidate if the tester can resolve dependancies.

NONE

No testing has been attempted, or the user has retracted the previous grade. Retest candidate.

Robert has asked advice, on the perl-qa and module-authors mailing lists, regarding the NA situation. There are several distribution that are applicable to several OSs, but may have problems on some. As such, how does CPAN::YACSmoke or the CPAN author decided to report a NA report instead of a FAIL report?

There are some other thoughts on reporting we have been discussing too, but many of these require further patches to CPANPLUS, which I've been planning to do for a while now. We're also looking to expand the FAQ, so if you have any questions you think should be added let us know.