Largely thanks to David Golden, we seem to have broken all records again. David already warned me at the end of May that he was planning to top 100,000 reports in a month, and 3 weeks into June he did just that, after which he started aiming for 150,000! With 138,311 reports finally submitted, David is now our top monthly tester, with Chris and Andreas vying for second place. Although it has to said that Chris does have rather a good excuse for not meeting David's challenge last month, as his latest project, Niamh Olivia Williams, was born last Wednesday. Apparently Chris has machines prepped and ready for her to help him pass David for July ;)
Right across the board, the reports have all hit their highs, with a total of 262,817 reports being submitted during the month. The stats website suffered a little with the daily updates, although this was due to two different parsing errors that surfaced in a few reports, which have now been fixed. The daily updates now seem to be running nice and smoothly, and I'm now looking to finish off some further automation work.
Another of our top testers, Jon Allen, has also helped to identify Mac OS X versions that don't see much testing. While Leopard (the latest release) has some testing on 5.10.0 and 5.8.8, it would be beneficial to see a lot more, for those releases of the perl interpreter. Tiger is seeing the majority of testing, with 5.10.0 and 5.8.8 making up the bulk of reports, so a few more on 5.8.7 and 5.8.6 would be good to see. Lastly, Panther testing seems to concentrate on 5.8.1, 5.8.2 and 5.8.3, and would definitely benefit from more testing on later releases of Perl. Jon has written a script that I hope to adapt to provide a better breakdown for other OSs in future updates.
June also featured YAPC::NA in Chicago, where I presented "How To Be A CPAN Tester". The talk was mostly a brief introduction to CPAN Testing, with several references to the installation and configuration of the tools on the wiki, plus a list of the community websites used. The talk appeared to go down well, and at the BOF later the same day, I got a few interested parties that were looking to setup a CPAN testing box of some sort. Hopefully this also means we'll be getting another Sun machine to test with a variety of perls too. Next month Chris Williams will be giving his version of the talk at YAPC::Europe in Copenhagen.
During my talk in Chicago, I also announced that Léon Brocard, who has been looking after the CPAN Testers Reports site for several years, has handed the reins over to me. After which it seems there was a lot of interest in improving the report capabilities of the site. Gabor Szabo and Adam Kennedy had ideas for updating the site, and יובל קוג'מן (Yuval Kogman, aka nothingmuch) has also since hinted at some ideas too, so over the coming months expect some additional functionality to appear, plus further integration with some of the other CPAN Tester sites. My thanks to Léon for keeping the site going for all these years and for the major improvements he made, particularly with the use of the YUI colour charts. You can also blame him for getting me involved with CPAN Testers in the first place, after his BOF presentation in 2003 at YAPC::Europe in Paris :)
Again we had over 100 testers submitting reports last month, with 20 new addresses mapped, of which we had 12 new testers identified. In addition, with so many addresses unmatched, I reran a check through the complete set of reports to see if I could find some matches for addresses from old reports. The result was a further mapping of 48 addresses. I suspect some of the still unmatched addresses from the early days of reporting have long since fallen into disuse, so it's unlikely that I'll be able to resolve them. However, if you were a CPAN Tester, especially from 1999 to about 2003, although later is good too, please check the leader board and see if any of your old addresses appear in the list. Let me know, and I'll update the lists.
