* nadim khemir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-09-06 10:20]: > The smoke test results are a good reminder, to new developers > and not so new, that what they do is not just used by them. If > they dislike getting results they can say "no thanks" as any of > us but eliminating the mails, by default, eliminates one > possibility to educate new module authors.
This is why I proposed (over on perl-qa) that the welcome basket mail should periodically be resent unless the author has logged onto the system and explicitly turned off *all* mail. Hopefully that would be neither intrusive (which we are hearing complaints about) nor overly mute (which is a concern for the people who would like CPAN to continue to improve). > The all-on or all-off solution is not good. It’s not supposed to be all-or-nothing. It’s just going to be all-or-nothing as a stopgap right now. In the future there will hopefully be more granular control over what the tester is interested in. > Neither is the centralized solution. Having a central web page, > database, ... is also going to be more work for you and it will > need to be maintained (thank you for all the work you are > already doing btw). The decentralised approach isn’t working sustainably, and a centralised component is necessary anyway if we want test report summaries to be available from other CPAN-related services. I think the right answer here is to make it easy for others to share the burden in maintaining the site. > Why not let authors decide which modules they want to get > smoked? > Why not let authors decide which platform they want their > modules smoked on? I am categorically opposed. An author should not get to censor the information that is available about his modules. Plain and simple. That information is valuable in itself, regardless of what the author thinks about it. It might be useful to let the stipulate that s/he particularly cares about certain system configurations; maybe the Testers can then take that as a hint for what to prioritise. But letting an author *turn off* reports for certain configurations seems like it would run counter to *your very own* point that what authors upload is not used just by them. > If you still opt for the centralized control, will it be > possible to install a private smoke environment and a private > centralized control? I’m not sure why you would think that the answer would be anything other than yes. Distributions provide test suites. You run those. There’s your smokebot. And if you don’t want to write code to administrate the smokebot and aggregate the data, you can install Smolder right this minute. This is completely independent of CPAN Testers. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
