All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Bringing Test::Reporter to CPAN.pm

dagolden on 2006-08-09T04:30:06

I've just uploaded CPAN::Reporter to CPAN and it should soon be available on mirrors worldwide.

As part of my goal of improving the availability of test information for Vanilla Perl, I decided to try to get Test::Reporter working with CPAN rather than CPANPLUS. The result is CPAN::Reporter, though, along the way, I also wound up writing Tee for portability.

Standard CPAN.pm doesn't yet support it, but I'm consulting with the CPAN maintainer and have created a subversion branch with working support. It's now at the point where it could use some real-world testing and feedback before it can be considered for inclusion in the main line of CPAN. If you're not afraid of running bleeding edge CPAN code, please consider giving it a try.

Here is an excerpt from the CPAN::Reporter Pod -- please see the full documentation for more details, including how to install the CPAN.pm branch that supports it.

SYNOPSIS

  1. Install a version of CPAN.pm that supports CPAN::Reporter
  2. Install CPAN::Reporter
  3. Edit .cpanreporter/config.ini
  4. Test/install modules as normal with "cpan" or "CPAN::Shell"

DESCRIPTION

CPAN::Reporter is an add-on for the CPAN.pm module that uses Test::Reporter to send the results of module tests to the CPAN Testers project.

The goal of the CPAN Testers Projectis to test as many CPAN packages as possible on as many platforms as possible. This provides valuable feedback to module authors and potential users to identify bugs or platform compatibility issues and improves the overall quality and value of CPAN.

One way individuals can contribute is to send test results for each module that they test or install. Installing CPAN::Reporter gives the option of automatically generating and emailing test reports whenever tests are run via CPAN.pm.

Any other feedback or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Nice

barbie on 2006-08-09T14:17:44

Will have to have a look at whether CPAN::YACSmoke can be made pluggable for either CPAN or CPANPLUS now :) Although it's going to have to wait until after YAPC::Europe. I don't think I can juggle that well ;)

OT: Tee?

Aristotle on 2006-08-21T01:29:45

Any reason IO::Tee didn’t do it for you? Or why it should be a top-level namespace?

Re:OT: Tee?

dagolden on 2006-08-29T14:08:03

There were a few reasons why not IO::Tee:

  • I needed portable command-line teeing of non-perl programs (e.g. make) with STDOUT and STDERR redirection -- IO::Tee only tees Perl handles within Perl programs.

  • For the ptee program, I could have used IO::Tee, but that would have been overkill for the purpose and would have added a dependency.

  • Plus IO::Tee would have meant extra tie overhead when I didn't need any of that.

As for the namespace, I think we've moved past the point where people are finding things via namespace hierarchies -- it's mostly search. What is this? It's "tee" in Perl, so "Tee". Could it have been "X::Y::Tee"? Sure, but I didn't think that would have made it any easier to figure out or find.