The missing CPAN testers list

barbie on 2003-09-10T12:25:01

Right, installed all the necessary gubbins and started up cpansmoke for File::Find::Rule, seeing as the latest version doesn't have a test report for MSWin32. It passed (of course) after which the script asked whether I wanted to send a report to the cpan testers mailing list. Yep, fire away.

Alas all did not go according to plan:

Died at C:\Perl\site\lib/Mail/Mailer.pm line 266, line 1.

Having spotted that someone else was having a similar problem, I'm now curious as to why things like SMTP won't even work. I'm assuming that the above error is due to attempts to run mail commands for an app that doesn't exist.

All of this has raised a few of questions:

Seeing as the transport mechanism has failed, I'd be more than willing to post the mails by hand. However, I can only assume they are automatically generated as I have not found a single flat file. Wouldn't it be a good idea to test whether the mail mechanism has failed, if it has ask whether a flat file is required for the tester to cut-n-paste and send by hand?.
There are several modules and scripts involved in all of this, and I currently have no idea which is the problem. I can't even find the module that uses Mail::Mailer, let alone that uses the _ask_report() function inside cpansmoke. As a consequence there are also several different authors who this might apply to. Who do I send it to?
Have other testers experienced problems? Did they resolve them or simply give up because they didn't know who to query?

Perhaps these are some of the questions that need to be answered in the FAQ, but as that hasn't been written yet, perhaps a quick link on the website.

There doesn't appear to be a cpan-testers-dicussion type list, where testers can post questions or errors like this can be raised, then fixed or noted. None of the -help or -info mails or the web site mention anything like it. I'm loathed to send messages to cpan-testers mailing list, as that seems more to be a automated information list only. Having a separate discussion list would hopefully be very low volume, and thus questions would likely get resolved very quickly. If I posted to the cpan-testers list I'm likely to get lost in the torrent of automated mails, and possibly never get an answer.

I've posted this not to inflame any testers or maintainers, but purely as means to throw some ideas into the air.

I shall attempt to get testing up and running on my box at home and see if that has any similar problems.

perl-qa

acme on 2003-09-10T14:00:50

The list where testers discussions come up is the perl-qa list. There is also a website. I'll get the next version of the testers website to point this out.