Smolder is a web-based app, written by Michael Peters of Plus Three, to aggregate (I keep wanting to say aggravate) smoke tests and display results and trends at a glance. Smolder takes the tedium out of reading TAP by highlighting failure in a colorful way. It also provides trend graphs, RSS feeds and emails. TAP isn't hidden from you, though; you can download it.
I am using Smolder to get the freebies--aggregation, pretty pictures, RSS and email--as part of a project to pull together a litter of tests into a coherent set of suites suitable for smoke testing. There are more sophisticated uses of Smolder than mine. Michael gave a talk on using Smolder with Buildbot at YAPC::NA 2008 to more fully automate your builds and tests. Invent your own fun integration to achieve your goals.
Installation notesSmolder is a self-contained app, installing everything it needs, including an Apache server and CPAN dependencies, in its own directory.
I had to do a bit of fiddling to get it up and running on MacOSX and Ubuntu Hardy Heron, but the installer, based on Krang, is well-organized, easily subclassable and Perl-hacker friendly, so you can easily enshrine your fixes for your platform in code and send them back to Michael.
My major Debian-related issue was the lack of a libperl.so--the Smolder installer complained it found no libperl and exited. You can either run
$ apt-get install libperl-dev
or just make a symlink from libperl.so.5.x.x. to libperl.so by hand. Either works.
useradd also failed because on my platform -M should be -m. Must remember to submit patch.
Also be sure libgd is compiled with TrueType support or your graphing will fail.
On MacOS X, I had to submit a patch for Leopard to create user and group since as of Leopard Apple abandoned NetInfo (
nicl) for Directory Services (
dscl). Also on Leopard, I'm having a most curious problem with libgd. Leopard seems to HATE it. It hisses into the log:
The process has forked and you cannot use this CoreFoundation functionality safely. You MUST exec().
Where to find it