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CPAN is mostly great for developers (Score:1)
Hmmm... someone stole my signature...
Re:CPAN is mostly great for developers (Score:1)
Tests are certainly necessary to run on every system for which the configuration is not a priori known.
OS vendor package repositories circumvent this by saying “any package in this set of packages is known with a certain degree of confidence to play well well with any other package within the same set”. This is what release engineering is about: working out which set of packages works together stably.
The CPAN has no provisions for any stable set of particular distributions. Instead, anything that gets uploaded is immediately “released”, so the state of how well everything plays together is constantly in flux. You cannot sanely do without running the test suite under such circumstances.
The real answer is David Golden’s [dagolden.com].
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The CP5.6.2AN is a brilliant idea that could provide a lot of feedback to CPAN uploaders as well as CPAN users. I could imagine a useful subscription service that bundled together dependencies which tested successfully on a given platform.
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Thing is, with good-quality test suites (which Debian mostly lacks), you can automate much of the release engineering process. That’s part of a possible extrapolation from David’s post: a system whereby a new release automatically becomes part of the
testingpackage set if it passes not only its own test suite against when running against the rest oftesting, but with it installed, all of its (immediate and indirect) dependents withintestingalso pass theirs. That way you could get a “rolRe: (Score:1)