All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

The fizzy got bizzy: CPAN Testing Reconfiguration

BinGOs on 2008-10-01T15:49:19

So I finally got around to tearing down and rebuilding all the CPAN smokers that I have on my NetBSD 3.1 box.

This is a smoker that pretty much runs unattended, getting new CPAN updates via RSS

As it had been running a long while the perl installations had picked up cruft along the way. Module::Build based distributions had for example installed M::B via the Module::Build::Compat passthrough Makefile.PL. I also noticed that some pesky distribution has managed to install LWP in a similiar fashion. Not good.

It too me two days of work to build, install and configure 10 separate perls. So I wasn't looking forward to pesky CPAN authors adding cruft to my prestine smokers.

Then it hit me. Lets separate out the CPANPLUS configuration/build directories from the perl installation directories and then chown the perl installation directories to root. Oh, yes, that would work indeedy.

So I have.

-bash-3.2$ ls -l rel
total 44
drwxr-xr-x  12 cpan  users  512 Sep 30 16:30 conf
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.10.0
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.6.2
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.1
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.2
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.3
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.4
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.5
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.6
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.7
drwxr-xr-x   5 root  users  512 Sep 30 09:54 perl-5.8.8
-bash-3.2$

Other noteworthy stuff that I did during the rebuilds:

  • Module::Build 0.30 is installed in all the smokers now
  • CPANPLUS::Dist::Build is installed in all the smokers, this is the patched version from svn which includes a fix for capturing the output from Build and Build test phases
  • All toolchain modules such as ExtUtils::MakeMaker are fully up to date

I am rolling these changes in working practises across all my smokers as they come up in the rotation