At the beginning of the last month, my automated mailer for authors and testers went live. For the most part many will never see the mails it produces, which is good, as it will mean that authors are uploading packages nicely formatted, and testers aren't sending out mangled reports. There have been an average of 3 or 4 authors a month who upload distributions without an archive extension accepted by CPAN/CPANPLUS or missing a version number. With testers it varies depending whether a bogus upload has filtered through the system, but again there are at least a few a month. This check now runs daily, as opposed to when I ran it manually roughly once a month. As a consequence it will hopefully help authors more quickly to know when they have uploaded a package that wasn't quite packaged correctly, and help testers spot when their test queue has got a bad package. If you do receive a mail from the system and don't believe your package/report should have been included, please let me know. It should be noted that authors can upload any archive format they choose, or any file format for that matter. However, to be most useful to end users, particularly those using the automated tools such as CPAN.pm and CPANPLUS, it is recommended that the following archive formats are used: .tar.gz, tgz, .tar.bz2 and .zip. In addition the format for a reliable upload is <distribution name>-<distribution version>.<archive extension>.
Also at the beginning of the month, we had a slight hiccup with the update to the Reports site. Unfortunately Léon was in the process of moving his server and the file used by Parse-BACKPAN-Packages became unavailable. Leon quickly sent me a copy of the file and I pointed the code at a local copy of the file instead of the remote one. However, it did prompt me to think about possibly running a mirror BACKPAN server, and thus creating the file myself. At least that way if anything happens to Leon's server, there is an alternative location from which the file can be grabbed from. Once I've got it working to my satisfaction, I'll shall implement a patch to Parse-BACKPAN-Packages so that it knows about alternative locations. As a consequence, this new BACKPAN mirror is now available publicly via http://backpan.cpantesters.org.
The CPAN Testers Wiki got an update this month too. Following some XHTML fixes and a little bit of a code clean up, I also added syndication feeds for the Recent Changes, as requested by David Golden. The fixes to the XHTML templates, CSS and RSS have hopefully helped to provide a cleaner interface.
Between 13th and 19th October there were some signification changes to the infrastructure of CPAN Testers. The fact that nobody appears to have noticed was a good thing. Expect an official announce soon :)
Over the course of the month, JJ came up with an alternative method of displaying the reports information on the Reports website. Many authors have complained (loudly), that due to the large number of reports their distributions have amassed, it gets difficult to see the important data from the irrelavent (to them). As a first attempt to minimise this the default selections within the Javascript ensured that only CPAN available distributions, tested against unpatched versions of Perl, were seen on each page. However, this also has the problem that for large listings the Javascript can still take a large amount of time to render the page correctly. For some visitors it can also be a bit disconcerting when the page initially locks while it runs the javascript, then half of the page suddenly disappears. This was always a short term measure, and following discussions with JJ, he has come up with a solution that uses a JSON data file, which loads in the browser with the predefined defaults. The new default will be to ONLY render the current distribution, with the ability to "Expand All" should you wish to see the other distribution versions. This will then mean no disappearing report data and no long running javascript. My thanks to JJ for persisting with this and figuring out the best way to render everything. The changes aren't live yet, but expect an update at some point this month.
Other website developments have continued at quite a pace and while some work has mostly been to improve XHTML compatibility and fixes cosmetic bugs, the new sites for Report Administration and Author Reporting Preferences are coming along very well. More news on those in the coming weeks. The CPAN Testers git repository has now been live for several weeks and will be expanding once more of the backend tools and code are cleaned up and packaged.
Again we had 126 testers submitting reports last month, our second highest by month, with 16 new addresses mapped, of which we had 6 new testers identified.
Work continues on for the websites and mailing systems along with numerous other changes within the CPAN Testers ecosystem. More news soon.
