After a bit of a break, since I was otherwised engaged in organising YAPC::Europe, I have now updated the CPAN Testers Statistics site.
There has been further response from my survey that I sent out several months ago, but more importantly I note that there are now even more testers getting involved. At least there are several new addresses that don't appear to be similar to exisiting testers. Unfortunately when my laptop died in Chicago, I lost the script I used to help me trawl various places to try and cross reference the email addresses with real people. Perhaps that's not a bad thing, as you're always meant to throw away the prototype ;)
I've also started looking at the reports that are filed with bad formatting. In some cases this is due to authors uploading the tarball without a version number, in others handcrafted reports are to blame from testers who are unaware that there is a format required. Ever so often I send the testers a mail to explain the incorrect formatting and get them to use the right tools. Mostly I've only had to send to about 2 testers over a 3 month period, this time around there were 10. In one respect that's good as they all appear to be new testers, but in another it's bad as the explainations of how to be a CPAN Tester don't seem to be getting out there. I've written a pod document that will be part of the next release of CPAN-YACSmoke, that covers all this, but it's no good being hidden away. So I have two plans over the next month. Get the pod document on the stats site, and get CPAN-YACSmoke tested properly so Robert can release another version. We've both been busy with other things this year, and the distribution has been slightly neglected. That will change soon :)
Re:CPAN::Reporter and Strawberry
barbie on 2006-09-06T10:58:05
> Most of the new people are probably casual CPAN::Reporter users
That could be true if they've handcrafted their own script, but CPAN::Reporter does the RightThing(tm) as far as formatting the distribution file name, which should be what is passed. However, it doesn't do any validation, so that might be something worth patching, just to ensure we get the right thing.
Thanks also for the updated address.
