# from David Golden
# on Thursday 04 September 2008 11:30:
>On Thu, Sep 4, 2008 at 1:09 PM, chromatic <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> I fail to understand the mechanism by which CPAN Testers has
>> seemingly removed the ability of testers to report bugs to the
>> correct places. For example,
>
>I think it's a mistake to set this up as just an author-vs-tester
>zero-sum situation. I see this as a team game where (hopefully) we're
>all pretty much on the same side in that we want stuff to work.
Yes. Thank you.
Having read a bit of the cpantesters archive, I now understand more
about where everyone is coming from.
We all have to realize that this is a team game and that there are
different interests and different camps. The rules may at times be
similar to a workplace, but if anyone is being paid here, they are
almost certainly being paid to play some *other* game. If this were a
workplace, perhaps we would have all been fired long ago. If testers
tell development to do something and development tells the testers
"no", and this goes on for years - the boss is going to call us all into
the meeting room one morning and I think you can all imagine how angry
she will be.
The same goes for testers being told to do something. If the developers
are running on a new toolchain, testers refusing to use it are not
serving the team. If we do have a customer running on an old
toolchain, that's probably the integration department's problem and the
development department should expect integration to do the work to
backport and support those targets.
You might also note that a productive and functional team has a qa
department checking the output of automated smoke tests and working to
make this more useful to the developers.
But we don't have a boss here, so the developers get to decide what they
want to do and the testers get to decide what they want to test, and
does anybody know where the integration department is?
As for complaints: Please don't get discouraged when receiving them and
try to be constructive when sending them. Complaints are useful - they
tell us that something is wrong. Now, I think a lot of the conflicts
come from the fact that the cpantesters have robots to do their
complaining in a massively parallel distributed way, whereas authors
have to take time out of their coding to write individual handcrafted
complaints about the robotic complaints.
I *could* write a program to complain back at every test report which
doesn't have Module::Build installed or has the client configured to
run Makefile.PL first or etc. Would that be useful? Probably not.
But I think we do need some system to register complaints about the
complaints. For example, the CPAN.pm -j 2 thing has probably resulted
in a lot of spurious FAIL reports on various distributions which are
not CPAN.pm. How can we track those down and draw a line through them?
Is this something that an awesome volunteer could do to watch for these
things which would make the automated test output more useful? Is
there something that could be done to automate and distribute this sort
of issue tracking and resolution? Would that cut down on the false
FAIL? How about checking that all PASSes are truly passes?
In short, there is lots that could be done. None of it is anybody's
job, there is no one boss to hold anyone accountable, etc. There will
be no whipping or firing. There will be lots of complaining, lots of
good work, plenty of thankless work all around, some bad code, some bad
decisions, some runaway bots, and probably even some well-written,
well-tested, useful code.
I too want to improve the CPAN, and my particular bent is toward making
APIs that make it easier to write good code and finding ways to do new
and interesting things. These are things that I personally enjoy doing
and if I'm any good at it, maybe someone else can get some benefit from
it. Everything else is a yak to shave. If you personally enjoy
tackling what I consider a yak, I would be more than happy to see it
shaven. Putting a pile of yaks in front of someone else results in
dead yaks instead of shaven ones.
Thanks,
Eric
--
Minus 1 million points for not setting your clock forward and trying the
code.
--Michael Schwern
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