After a discussion on the perl-qa list, and being blessed with a few hours free time, I wrote a shiny thing, which, given a module name on the CPAN, will find all its dependencies, and their dependencies yea even unto the Nth generation, and display a nice shiny report on their CPAN-testers results.
I expect it to be useful for authors trying to decide what to depend on (you don't want to depend on stuff that itself has fragile dependencies) and also for people trying to figger out why the hell some random module won't install.
To see half the CPAN, try pointing it at Angerwhale.
Any query page is very slow to load, even after querying the same module a second time right away.
Re:Needs some caching?
drhyde on 2007-08-05T08:48:06
Added some caching now, which makes it quite a bit better. It's still slow though, because:
- It's on the cheapest hosting provider I could find;
- It uses CGI
It's intended mainly as a proof-of-concept. Hopefully someone will pick it up and integrate it into the cpan-testers site and do all the boring work of making it mod_perl-safe:-)
Re:Very cool
sartak on 2007-08-05T02:24:14
Jifty does have more deps, but I'm not convinced that's a bad thing!:)
That's pretty rad. Is there anything that will detect & show circular dependencies?
-Ken
Re:some ideas that come to mind
drhyde on 2007-08-06T11:20:26
If I were to pre-compute results, then probably the thing to do is to drive it off the CPAN recent uploads list. I won't ignore Test::* dependencies, because if someone lists one of 'em as a pre-requisite then its failures are just as important as failures in any other dependency. Which, by a rather convoluted route, brings us back to the mailing list thread that spawned this, in which people were grumbling about Test::Pod etc causing failures.
This is a very nifty thing you have built.
One can look at barbie's statistics on modules that fail http://perl.grango.org/wdists.html and http://perl.grango.org/wpcent.html and then rebound off domm's Kwalitee pages that provides the crucial list of which modules/dists depend on a flakey module.
This would then allow people to hone in on unloved, critical modules and see if the author is no longer interested in them and take over maintenance (or maybe the author doesn't realise these tools exist these days, and it might revive their interest.
But we need to pull all this together and create a one-stop shopping place for all your testing needs.
Mebbe we can figger out how to go about doing this at Y::E this year. We need a plan.
Re:This is marvellous
drhyde on 2007-08-08T09:37:50
Are you signed up for the CPAN Testers BOF?Re:This is marvellous
grinder on 2007-08-09T08:36:02
Natürlich:)
That only shows 18 because it can't figure out all the dependencies. The final tally was over 30, iirc. And that was only if you were lucky enough to get Math::Pari to build.
