Oslo - Day 1 - HTTP transport for CPAN::Testers

dagolden on 2008-04-05T23:47:36

If you haven't seen rjbs's journal, he posted about some of what he, jonasbn and I have been working on here in Oslo.

We came up with some good ideas for a general metabase for CPAN distributions, which we think can become the back-end not just for CPAN Testers 2.0 but for other tools as well that are all doing essentially the same thing in collecting distributed information about distributions.

However, we realized that it would probably be a lot of work, so we wanted to start with something tangible that could be successful quickly. So we added 'HTTP' as a valid transport() option for Test::Reporter and RJBS created Test::Reporter::HTTPGateway to be a remote server that can gateway HTTP transport to cpan-testers@perl.org. We've done some limited testing and it appears to be working well. (More testing tomorrow.)

The documentation could still be improved -- but essentially, if you install the latest dev releases of Test::Reporter (1.38_01) and CPAN::Reporter (1.14_01), then you can use this config option in your .cpanreporter/config.ini:

    transport=HTTP http://some.example.com/gateway/

and assuming you're running T::R::HTTPGateway at that URL it should work.

In the process, I wound up using some code that I had started working on a couple months ago and never finished to support other transports like Net::SMTP::TLS, so while that hasn't been tested yet (maybe tomorrow), it's possible that Net::SMTP::TLS may actually be working as well, or could be made to work with little additional effort.

That's the news from Oslo.

As an additional note, I want to particularly thank TPF for sponsoring my travel and Linpro for providing excellent facilities for the hackathon and also some very friendly and very helpful hosts. Also, I want to send a big thank you to Salve for taking the lead in organizing the event in the first place!

-- dagolden