Lately, I've been finding David Cantrell's brilliant CPAN Dependencies website easier and more useful than the CPAN Testers website itself.
The CPAN Dependencies summaries are just do darned concise, while the CPAN Testers pages for an author are much harder to read (but then the dozen or so authors with dozens of modules tend to see these sites become unworkable far earlier than others).
In particular, the CPAN Dependencies summaries make it far easier to zero in on the most troublesome modules at a glance.
What I'd REALLY love to see on the CPAN Dependencies site would be some sort of "virtual distribution" for the entire author, showing ALL the modules for the author (INCLUDING all the distributions in the index, but EXCLUDING distributions that have been deprecated and aren't in the index, but for which CPAN Testers results remain recorded).
That way I could just look at my virtual distro (lets notionally call it Author::ADAMK) and see not only testing results for all my distributions, but also all the results for all the modules by author authors that I depend on.
So, on to the improvements in this release automation cycle.
I've removed the Module::Install Build.PL compatibility pass-through script. With the advent of configure_depends: I see Module::Install becoming Makefile.PL-only eventually and I don't plan to keep the very buggy Module::Build backend.
I've also, to my regret, given up on trying in my fight to try to use multiple pod-checking and such testing modules in one big 99_author.t test script.
Test::Pod had the short-sightedness to try and declare it's own plan automatically, even if a plan already existed, with no option to avoid it. And so the other modules just cargo-culted from that (although RJBS was nice enough to add a workaround to Test::MinimumVersion for me).
So, unfortunately, now I have to have TWO test scripts (I'm doing Test::Pod and Test::MinimumVersion on all my modules when AUTOMATED_TESTING is enabled).
Having seperate 98_pod.t and 99_pmv.t tests also has the benefit of fixing all the FAIL results I was getting. These didn't impact real end-users (since they only FAIL'ed on CPAN Testers) but were adversely impacting the APPEARANCE of the module's success rate, particularly on the CPAN Dependencies site.
This also probable means I need to do a ton (maybe three dozen) incremental CPAN releases to flush out all the broken ones.
So maybe it's time to re-investigate finishing my "automated module incrementing doohicky" module again (using a combination of PPI and Module::Inspector).
