Because I've been distracted writing my new CPAN dependency graph generator (to repair the main flaw in the CPAN Top 100 website) I haven't been paying the website a whole lot of attention in the last week or so.
I just run the website data generator once or twice a week, and other than that, I'm focusing on creating the next iteration of the support software.
After updating the data file today, imagine my surprise when a new module absolutely roared ahead of the previous #1 highest score, posting a new record of over 500,000 FAILure points.
It would appear that the June 18th release of DBD::mysql was something of a disaster, and the high number of modules that depend on MySQL means that the impact on end users is very high.
It's good to see that when something like this happens, it is highlighted on the list very quickly and very obviously.
However, in retrospect I'm somewhat disappointed that it took this long to highlight it (because I don't run the updater often enough). What if it just took a while because it took a few weeks to gradually climb up to the top of the list, fighting against high-dependency modules with one or two rare failures, that aren't growing so fast.
I'm wonder what might be done to spot these dramatic failures faster, within a few days of their release, rather than having to wait a week or so.
Even starting to do something like that will probably require a serious improvement to the update date of the data that feeds the website, and changes to teach the analyser about the concept of time.
Food for thought, certainly.
The question now of course, is how high a really big OMGIBROKECPAN event might score. Something in the vicinity of several million failure points certainly seems possible, especially if the number of CPAN Testers installs grows.
That one, the tests need to take the blame for, I think.
It's not that the module doesn't run, it's that one of the tests does not skip, it fails when there is no mysql server available, I think.
I'll have to find a round tuit - and I have an acute shortage at the moment - to help them in that regard.
