More mappings with 13 new address mappings, including 6 new testers. Welcome to the new testers and hopefully we'll see even more in 2008. As we close out 2007, it's good to see that there has been a healthy interest in CPAN Testers. Even if it has been considered as an annoyance for some. There are now 61 different platforms being tested and 20 different versions of Perl. Regards the latter value the patch levels have been ignored in the stats, although you can still get at the raw data in the SQLite DB if you wish. The several of the major league testers have upgraded their environments to additional include Perl 5.10.0, which is now leading the test reports for the month. Not too surprising seeing the responsiveness of CPAN Testers these days.
Taking a look at the tester submissions over the last month, it's impressive to see so many now regularly submitting several thousand a month. And we should not undervalued the efforts of those only submitting a few hundred a month, as only a few years ago they would have been topping the monthly stats. Although ActiveState have effectively stopped promoting Perl 5.6.1 on their page (it is still avaliable though), the testing of the two latest releases on Windows has probably been the best it has been for some considerable time. The major operating systems on the whole seem well represented, although it would be nice to see some VMS, AIX, HP-UX or other less used, but still popular, operating systems in there.
The number of badly formatted uploads and reports seem to be diminishing these days too, which has been good. We still get the odd one creeping through, but hopefully sometime during 2008 my alert script won't be compiling any emails for me :) One thing I do want to reiterate though, is that if you're going to get involved with CPAN Testing, please use an email address that people can contact you at. There are still a few who are using unreachable addresses and it makes it very difficult for authors to understand why something went wrong if you don't respond.
The stats database has now been successfully ported to the website box, with nightly remote backups just in case anything goes wrong. The code changes seem to have improved matters considerable and the database updates now take just under an hour to complete. Considering the rise in reports, I'm quite pleased with the improvements. Now to start looking at updating the website nightly :)
If you want to get involved in CPAN Testing, please checkout the CPAN Testers Wiki for details of how to set things up. You can also join the CPAN Testers Discussion mailing list if you need any further advice or if you have any suggestions for improving the tools or resources.
