Last month marked quite a momentus occasion, as David Cantrell submitted the one millionth report. I think Chris was after that accolade, but he'll just have to make do with being the highest test report submitter :) Thanks to the increased interest in bulk testing from our current top testers, we reach this point much sooner than I would have expected a few years ago. Thanks to these guys a large portion of CPAN has already been tested on 5.10, and we now have many reports across nearly all versions of Perl 5, certainly those known to be available in production environments.
Slaven Rezić's CPAN Testers Matrix is now accessible from each CPAN distribution page, as is David Cantrell's CPAN Dependencies site, although with the expected increase in traffic, Dave is currently moving the site to a new box. Using the database generated for the stats site, Andy Armstrong has created a slightly different presentation of the success/failure graph that's on the stats site. I currently create all the graphs statically, which is fine when I'm updating once a month. However, if I get the site updated more frequently, then it would be useful to enable you to click on the report you would like to see and create more professional looking graph/chart. I may well investigate more of manyeyes later.
Interest in CPAN Testing is increasing, even if some authors still appear to be completely unaware of who and what CPAN Testers are. One thing for anyone confused by these reports, they are generated by computer, and are often unattended. As such instructions in the README file don't get read. If you have a prerequisite that is outside of the MakeMaker or Module::Build prerequisite framework, try and detect it using Devel-CheckLib. The Notes For CPAN Authors wiki page was specifically written for authors who need pointers to enable them to achieve a clean install. Although it should be noted, that while CPAN Testers aren't necessarily average users, they are trying to recreate environments that a brand new user would likely experience. The reports aren't there to harangue or berate you, they are trying to highlight problems that occurred during the build and testing processes. In some cases this may highlight problems in the automated test environment, which testers try very hard to resolve as soon as possible, but in the bigger picture we are making CPAN a more reliable and enviable code repository.
17 more addresses mappings, including 8 new testers. Welcome aboard folks.
