Jonathan Leffler wrote:
Good Evening (well, it was evening when I was writing this),
Having just released a new version of DBD::Informix, I've gotten a couple of
bug reports from CPAN Testers about not being able to install it - which is
no vast surprise since those people typically do not have the relevant
software installed (which, in this case, means IBM Informix ESQL/C).
However, some of them don't have DBI installed either, and that absence
causes the Makefile.PL with DBD::Informix to fail.
Questions for you:
1. Do you have a neat way of avoiding problems with DBI not being
available, or do you just ignore the reports from CPAN Testers?
I had a long thread on cpan-testers
(http://www.mail-archive.com/cpan-testers-discuss%40perl.org/msg00076.html)
about failures they were reporting for DBD::ODBC. It appears
cpan-testing mechanism is going through a lot of changes right now so I
summed up their advice here:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.dbi.dev/2007/11/msg5180.html
(although there was a slight bug in the "use" of DBI which should have
been "require").
I amended the DBI::DBD docs slightly at:
http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI-1.602/lib/DBI/DBD.pm#Pure_Perl_version_of_Makefile.PL
2. Is it me or is it silly that the CPAN Testers requirement for
'cannot install the module because the pre-requisites are missing' is to
exit with a 0 (success) status? It grates horribly on my sense of what is
appropriate to report a failure as success.
This should go away soon - once configure_requires/build_requires is
supported and in use across all cpan-testers.
3. Does anyone use ExtUtils::AutoInstall to assist? I've had it in
DBD::Informix for a while (read several years) but have just done the basic
testing with a Perl without DBI installed, and ExtUtils::AutoInstall doesn't
seem to help because I 'use DBI::DBD' and 'DBI' in various places.
not me.
I'm quite willing to look at your source code so if you have a mechanism in
place and working -- just tell me which module to download. Or you can
explain in email with illustrations.
At the moment, to satisfy the CPAN Testers crowd, I think I'd have to have a
dummy Makefile.PL that (a) arranged to install DBI and then (b) ran more or
less the current Makefile.PL. I'm sure that isn't kosher, but I'm not sure
how else to do it, and I am therefore inclined to ignore the reports, but
I'd really rather not waste their time, or my time, poking around looking at
their bogus (but automatically generated) problem reports.
I would set configure_requires and build_requires in your META.yml and
wait for things to change. You can just exit with 0 and write no
Makefile.PL now and the error reports will go away.
(Does anyone else get spam in [EMAIL PROTECTED] messages? If so,
do you just reject them or do you do anything more fanciful with them?)
not me.
Martin
--
Martin J. Evans
Easysoft Limited
http://www.easysoft.com
