Last night's Birmingham.pm technical meeting went down very well. I did a talk about CPAN testing that highlighted how some where unaware of all the extra effort that goes into making sure what's on CPAN is tested to promote reliable and portable code. When most talk about CPAN they just think of the mass of code available for free. But there is a big effort from a range of volunteers, those that run PAUSE/CPAN, the testers, the authors themselves and document/FAQ writers that make it what it is. In a lot of ways thats a good thing, but it's always interesting to lift the lid occasionally.
I'm hoping to do another talk more about Phalanx at some point in the future, in an effort to persuade Birmingham.pm to pick a biggish distribution that we can work on. There is a US monger group that are, or at least were, planning to do this, and I think it will be a good incentive to give people a hands-on experience of writing and documenting tests. That's always assuming we can find the time with the other project [1] we're planning.
In my talk last night I covered a few things I thought would be nice to see more of in CPAN Testing. I'll try and document my thoughts a bit better and post them here soon.
[1] The Birmingham Job begins.
Update: Added CPANTS and rt slides to my talk slides. BTW the mispelling of Thomas' name in my reply to Andy was not intentional. Sorry Thomas.
Re:Thanks
barbie on 2004-01-09T10:07:37
Actually, rt.cpan.org is something I forgot to mention. Thomas Klauser emailed me to remind me of CPANTS too. I'll update the slides with the extra references and hopefully upload them by the end of today.I think in some cases it's fine to not know about the effort behind the scenes, as the volunteers (for the most part) are not seeking fame and gratitude. However, when you make people aware occasionally of all the extra effort that is done, it does help them to appreciate and value what all those volunteers do. And sometimes it inspires others to get involved
... and for that alone the talk worked :)
