use Perl

YAPCs are always a good opportunity to meet other perl users. As the organisers of this year's YAPC::EU in Copenhagen have been good enough to allow me to do a talk on CPAN Testing, Barbie and myself will be arranging a CPAN Testers Birds of Feather (BOF) session.

Barbie's original announcement:

This will very likely be at the end of the first day of the conference, ie. the Wednesday.

If you are attending YAPC::EU and are interested in CPAN Testing, please add your name to the wiki page

Maybe not a definitive list, but this is what I have gleamed:

• AUTOMATED_TESTING - Set by an automated CPAN Tester to indicate, erm, that we are running automated tests.
• PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT - Set so that we take the defaults to prompts in Makefile.PL and Build.PL
• PERL5_CPAN_IS_RUNNING - CPAN.pm appears to set this to process ID of the CPAN process.
• PERL5_CPANPLUS_IS_RUNNING - CPANPLUS sets this to the process ID of the CPANPLUS process, note also check PERL5_CPAN_IS_RUNNING, as CPAN also sets this variable
• PERL5_CPANPLUS_IS_VERSION - Set by CPANPLUS to indicate the version that is running
• PERL5_CPANPLUS_VERBOSE - Set by CPANPLUS to indicate whether it is generating verbose output

Kindly pointed out by Dave Golden:

• PERL5OPT - used by CPAN::Reporter to load Devel::Autoflush to force output from PL and test files that don't set autoflush themselves. (This has been a headache and is still in active development to find a workable solution.)
• PERL5LIB - may or may not be set, depending on the test setup
• PERL_CPAN_REPORTER_DIR - if set, this directory is used in place of the default .cpanreporter directory; this will affect not only the location of the default config.ini, but also the location of the CPAN::Reporter::History database and any other files that live in that directory
• PERL_CPAN_REPORTER_CONFIG - if set, this file is used in place of the default config.ini file; it may be in any directory, regardless of the choice of configuration directory

Added by Jos Boumans:

• PERL5_CPANPLUS_IS_EXECUTING -- set by CPANPLUS to the full path of either Build.PL or Makefile.PL while it's executing this file. This helps Module::Install understand that it is running under CPANPLUS and can delegate prereqs up to the parent process

Added by Simon Bertrang:

• TEST_POD - enables testing of documentation
• TEST_AUTHOR - in a few cases this enables testing in general
• PERL_TEST_POD - another name to enable documentation tests
• PERL_TEST_CRITIC - used to enable critic testing
• AUTHOR_TESTING - a few authors hide tests with this, mostly documentation tests

Set up a new smokebox this weekend, Dragonfly BSD 2.0.

Tidy.

I uploaded CPANPLUS::YACSmoke recently, along with POE::Component::CPANPLUS::YACSmoke, to CPAN.

So what is the fuss and how is it so different from CPAN::YACSmoke ?

Well, it is a port/reimplementation of CPAN::YACSmoke to use a CPANPLUS::Dist distribution class called CPANPLUS::Dist::YACSmoke. This backend deals with all the stuff that CPAN::YACSmoke used to deal with, such as munging test reports, deciding whether to send reports if we have sent them already, etc, etc.

And it also handles checking whether we have reported a PASS grade already for a prereq and if so it skips running the test-suite for that prereq again.

This functionality has been in CPAN.pm for a little while, and I felt it should be easy to implement with CPANPLUS.

That said, I did have lots of advice and patience from Jos Boumans to assist me. Cheers!

Seems good in initial testing. I'm starting to migrate my smokers over to using it and so far the speed of smoke testing has increased considerably.

Hurrah.

Niamh Olivia Williams was born on the 25th June, 4 days ahead of schedule. >:)

Sleep is a distant memory.

Also, this made me choke myself laughing.

Rocco Caputo has announced that POE 1.0 is out.

And it isn't an April Fools

DrHyde pointed out on #cpantesters-discuss channel that there has been an announcement by Robert Spiers regarding the cpan-testers mailing list.

For those who receive their recent uploads notifications via email, this may be a PITA.

Some alternative mechanisms already exist:

• POE::Component::SmokeBox::Uploads::RSS
• POE::Component::SmokeBox::Uploads::NNTP
• POE::Component::WWW::PAUSE::RecentUploads
• POE::Component::WWW::PAUSE::RecentUploads::Tail
• WWW::PAUSE::RecentUploads

Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

Earlier this week, Dave Cantrell sent the one millionth CPAN Test Report.

I need to get some things off my chest that I have observed during CPAN smoke testing:

WHY OH WHY?! do you insist on writing your own prompting mechanisms in your Makefile.PL? ExtUtils::MakeMaker, Module::Install and even Module::Build have a prompt function/method. Please use it. Either that or check whether AUTOMATED_TESTING and/or PERL_MM_USE_DEFAULT environment variables are set and provide default values accordingly.

Does everyone who tests or installs your module really, really have to install Test::Pod and Test::Pod::Coverage just to run your testsuite? Does anyone else, but you really care? Please learn to skip.

And finally, please, please, please don't try and install modules from your Makefile.PL using the CPAN API. I don't test using CPAN and I don't want your favourite module installed in my smoke testing perl, thank you very much. Oh and you are assuming that I have configured CPAN in the first place. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Love BinGOs

Or rather smoking certain CPAN modules can damage your perl

Andreas König spotted it first, but I have had two smokers destroyed in the past two days by smoke testing Perl::Dist.

If you are using a CPANPLUS/CPAN::YACSmoke smoker I would advise excluding 'Perl-Dist' for the moment using a cpansmoke.ini file:

[CONFIG]
exclude_dists=<<HERE
^Perl-Dist
HERE

Thank you for your attention.