Two cents from someone who appreciates the hell out of the CPAN testing service and eagerly awaits new reports every time I release a new version of a module.
> However, from author's perspective, if a report is legitimate (and > assuming they care), they really only need to hear it once. Having > more and more testers sending the same FAIL report on platform X is > overkill and gives yet more encouragement for authors to tune out. > > So the more successful CPAN Testers is in attracting new testers, the > more duplicate FAIL reports authors are likely to receive, which makes > them less likely to pay attention to them. Sorry, but paying attention is the author's job. A fail is something that should be fixed, period, regardless of the number of them. As mentioned elsewhere, the idea of author's "receiving" FAIL reports is outdated anyway: they should be pulling them via a RSS feed. > First, we can lower our collective tolerance of false positives -- for > example, stop telling authors to just ignore bogus reports if they > don't like it and find ways to filter them. +1 > Second, we can reclassify PL/make/Build fails to UNKNOWN. I don't like this: failure by any other name would smell just as bad. In other words, if an end user is not going to have a happy, functional module after typing install Foo::Bar at the CPAN prompt, this is a failure that should be noted as such and fixed by the author. Makefiles have a surprising amount of power and flexibility in this regard. > However, as long as the CPAN Testers system has individual testers > emailing authors, there is little we can do to address the problem of > repetition. Yep. Use RSS or deal with the duplicates, I say. > For those who read this to the end, thank you for your attention to > what is surely becoming a tedious subject. Thanks for raising it. I honestly feel the problem is not with the testers or the testing service, but the authors. But perhaps I'm still grumpy from the slew of modules I've come across on CPAN lately that are popular yet obviously unmaintained, with bug reports, questions, and unapplied patches that linger in the RT queues for years. It would be nice if we had some sort of system that tracked and reported on that. -- Greg Sabino Mullane [EMAIL PROTECTED] End Point Corporation
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