I've been a rather slack CPAN author for the last couple of years and haven't been updating my modules as much as I should.
But over the weekend, whilst updating the Teach-In slides for the UKUUG conference I discovered the new CPAN testers matrix and, in particular, the appalling test results for the current version of Symbol::Approx::Sub.
Obviously having major test failures in such a crucial module is a terrible state of affairs so I spent some time looking at the problem last night.
Luckily it was a relatively easy fix. It was just a test which had been written by someone (me!) whose knowledge of Perl had temporarily left them. Fixing it was simple enough, and I was able to release the first new version of Symbol::Approx::Sub for over two years. I also switched the distribution from ExtUtils::MakeMaker to Module::Build and made a few other tweaks which have improved its kwalitee.
And this morning, I saw a much happier set of test results. Which was nice.
Whilst poking around in my test results, I noticed that WWW::MakeAShorterLink was also failing far too many tests. It turns out that this is because the MASL web site no longer exists. Or, rather, it redirects to TinyURL. So I've submitted a deletion request for WWW::MakeAShorterLink. It will be removed from CPAN in the next couple of days. All of your URL-shortening needs will be handled by WWW::Shorten. And, yes, next on my list is to fix the problems in that distribution's test plan.
Many thanks must go to the CPAN testers whose is so important in revealing my inadequacies as a programmer.
