http://use.perl.org/~zrusilla/journal/ zrusilla's use Perl Journal en-us use Perl; is Copyright 1998-2006, Chris Nandor. Stories, comments, journals, and other submissions posted on use Perl; are Copyright their respective owners. 2012-01-25T02:43:19+00:00 pudge pudge@perl.org Technology hourly 1 1970-01-01T00:00+00:00 http://use.perl.org/images/topics/useperl.gif http://use.perl.org/~zrusilla/journal/ http://use.perl.org/~zrusilla/journal/37133?from=rss <p> Smolder is a web-based app, written by Michael Peters of Plus Three, to aggregate (I keep wanting to say aggravate) smoke tests and display results and trends at a glance. Smolder takes the tedium out of reading TAP by highlighting failure in a colorful way. It also provides trend graphs, RSS feeds and emails. TAP isn't hidden from you, though; you can download it. </p><p> I am using Smolder to get the freebies--aggregation, pretty pictures, RSS and email--as part of a project to pull together a litter of tests into a coherent set of suites suitable for smoke testing. There are more sophisticated uses of Smolder than mine. Michael gave a talk on using Smolder with Buildbot at YAPC::NA 2008 to more fully automate your builds and tests. Invent your own fun integration to achieve your goals.</p><p> <b>Installation notes</b> </p><p>Smolder is a self-contained app, installing everything it needs, including an Apache server and CPAN dependencies, in its own directory. </p><p> I had to do a bit of fiddling to get it up and running on MacOSX and Ubuntu Hardy Heron, but the installer, based on Krang, is well-organized, easily subclassable and Perl-hacker friendly, so you can easily enshrine your fixes for your platform in code and send them back to Michael. </p><p> My major Debian-related issue was the lack of a libperl.so--the Smolder installer complained it found no libperl and exited. You can either run<br> <code>$ apt-get install libperl-dev</code> <br> or just make a symlink from libperl.so.5.x.x. to libperl.so by hand. Either works. </p><p> useradd also failed because on my platform -M should be -m. Must remember to submit patch. </p><p> Also be sure libgd is compiled with TrueType support or your graphing will fail. </p><p> On MacOS X, I had to submit a patch for Leopard to create user and group since as of Leopard Apple abandoned NetInfo (nicl) for Directory Services (dscl). Also on Leopard, I'm having a most curious problem with libgd. Leopard seems to HATE it. It hisses into the log:<br> <code> The process has forked and you cannot use this CoreFoundation functionality safely. You MUST exec(). </code> <br> Anyone else seen this message before? </p><p> <b>Where to find it</b> </p><p> <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/smolder/?abmode=1">Here, on Sourceforge.</a> </p> zrusilla 2008-08-08T18:13:33+00:00 journal http://use.perl.org/~zrusilla/journal/37071?from=rss $work's sysadmins confirmed that our cage servers were strapped down shortly before the LA quake. Whew! Now if only sysadmins had the power to predict quakes.. zrusilla 2008-07-31T18:35:34+00:00 journal