Well someone has finally blown Chris Williams out of the water. Chris was steadfastly producing his 30,000+ reports as he's been doing for the past 5 months, but after tipping him off a while back about Andreas catching him, Andreas decided to out do himself this month. Thankfully the cpan-testers mailing list has been turned off for outbound, otherwise Andreas' 50683 reports would have probably wiped out the servers at perl.org. In fact I suspect he may have only ramped up because the outbound mail was turned off. As a consequence the total number of reports submitted last month, far exceeded anything we've seen before, topping 150858 reports! With Slaven Rezic, Imacat and Daniel Bosold also stepping up their testing, I'm expected to see this level of report submissions to continue.
Despite all the testing currently being performed, it is perhaps interesting to note that Perl 5.8.8, 5.10.0 and 5.11.0 are the 3 most tested versions of the perl interpreter. While these are likely to be the 3 versions of most interest to many developers, it would be good to keep the prescence of earlier perls, especially 5.005, 5.6.1, 5.6.2 and a selection of 5.8.*. I know some of the testers are certainly trying to cover some of the tradional platforms, but if you have any machines that don't get regularly tested, and can spare the clock cycles, please see if getting involved in CPAN Testers is something that you could do. At the moment NetBSD seems to have the best coverage of testings, so if you have a Darwin, Solaris, Win32 or other unusual platform, all test reports will be gratefully received.
16 more addresses mappings, including 9 new testers. As of this morning, my 6 monthly tester clarification mail has been sent out to 60 addresses used in the last 6 months that haven't been correctly mapped. If you receive one of these mails, please take the time to complete it and send it back to me.
The Oslo QA Workshop seems to have been a worthwhile experience for CPAN Testers, particularly David Golden, Ricardo J Signes and Jonas B Nielson, who between them have helped to generate the HTTP transporter layer for updating a central CPAN Testers database into shape. Ask Bjørn Hansen is already working on the central store, so this is a very welcome piece of the solution towards moving towards removing the email transport layer altogether. The final solution is still a while off yet, but things are moving, which is great. So thanks guys for taking the time out to work on the code.
I recently attended the UKUUG 2008 Spring Conference, during which a discussion arose around CPAN Testers, and how other dynamic language repositories handle their testing. It would seem that Perl is head and shoulders above every other language repository, never mind dynamic laguages. There were several developers of other languages that were truly amazed at the voluntary effort being put into ensuring CPAN is as well tested as possible. So a hearty pat on the back to all the CPAN Testers, you're setting a standard for others to aspire to. And to quote Mike Whitaker ... Perl is SO not dead :)
