On Friday I finally got around to looking at a problem that Andy mentioned on the CPAN Testers list. The current cpansmoke reports, are worded a little confusingly for someone who has not seem them before. The explanation that these are automated reports is not spelled out very well, and the use of the first person, makes you wonder whether the tester or the script wrote some of the text.
I have now sent a patch off to Autrijus, so hopefully he'll get a chance to look at it and modify or implement it soon. In the meantime I've implemented it in my version of CPANPLUS. So, if you should receive a CPAN test report from me from now on, you will see the my new format. If you have any comments regarding the layout or text, please let me know.
Also on Friday I discovered why my version of CPANPLUS was never printing the test results in the report (I've been cut-n-pasting every report until now). Unfortunately, in my version of CPANPLUS, if ANY failure occurs (including a fetch on a non-existant YAML file), the lot gets evaporated in a $self->{_comments} = ''!!! So I fixed that, then discovered the error stack records the fetch fail on the YAML and causes failures for brand new modules that don't have a report yet!. Unfortunately I can't create a patch for that, as there is another bit of trickery I had to do back last year, to get the automated tests working for my box, which doesn't appear to apply to anyone else. I noted that someone else has been having the occasional problem of FAIL reports being created, but no fail results. I'm wondering if this is all related. With the next release of CPANPLUS (unfortunately 0.049 doesn't work for me) I shall have another look and see if the fetch failures still happen.
