Zefram posted this to perl5-porters and I said I'd redirect it and answer here. I'll top-post my reply to keep his email intact. Sorry that it's inscrutable without reading his email.
I prefer the alternatives in the order 0 1, 2. If Andreas is convinced, perhaps he can ask Ilya. Or perhaps there's an alternative to 1, which is Andreas and Ilya agreeing on a new method to skip tests than abusing AUTOMATED_TESTING. With respect to 1, that's possible now locally with distroprefs. I wouldn't do that in CPAN.pm for T::R::P always but might special case it if it's part of Bundle::CPAN. Before 2, I'd rather just fork T::R::P, call it "Term::ReadLine::Perl::WithoutTests" or something and fix the test script there. -- David ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Zefram <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 4:40 AM Subject: Term::ReadLine::Perl in Bundle::CPAN To: [email protected] Term::ReadLine::Perl is pissing me off. It has an obnoxious install process, wherein "make test" starts up a program that uses the readline facility and demands input from the tty. If you've got Term::ReadKey installed, it even throws away typeahead. If you're installing it (as a dependency of something else) on many perls consecutively, or from cron, the installations grinds to a halt at that point. This obnoxious behaviour is a problem because T:RL:P is part of Bundle::CPAN. It gets installed (or at least gets an attempt to install it) pretty often. By proxy, Bundle::CPAN has obnoxious installation behaviour. We need to fix this. I see three main possibilities for doing this: (0) Get T:RL:P itself fixed. (1) Put a workaround into CPAN.pm. (2) Drop T:RL:P from Bundle::CPAN. I have so far tried approach 0, and it's not looking good. I submitted a minimal patch, via RT, but the author refuses to believe that anyone does "big installs" via automated tools such as CPAN.pm. Maybe someone more diplomatic than I am can talk him round, but I suspect not. Approach 1 would be pretty easy, though of course Wrong. T:RL:P will skip the interactive test if it sees a true value in $ENV{AUTOMATED_TESTING}. CPAN.pm could locally put that in the environment, specifically for "make test" on T:RL:P. Approach 2 would preferably involve having some alternative full-editing T:RL:* to include in the bundle. T:RL:Gnu is problematic because it relies on a C library. There is a T:RL:Zoid, which on a cursory look seems very satisfactory, and it even manages to test most of the interactive behaviour without making the test suite interactive. Using this automatically in CPAN.pm would require either CPAN.pm to detect it and set up $ENV{PERL_RL}, or a dual-lifed version of Term::ReadLine that includes T:RL:Zoid among the defaults to look for. Preferences? -zefram
