On Saturday 22 December 2007 21:58:46 David Golden wrote:
> These are not simple modules. Assuming that some smoker can get these
> to successfully send you a report, then which scenario seems more
> likely:
>
> (a) that the smoker's installation is fundamentally broken
> (b) that your distribution isn't sufficiently portable to handle their
> installatiion
>
> In the case of (a), if you send me actual reports that you take issue
> with, and if the nature of the fundamental breakage can be determined
> in an automated way, I'll consider adding logic to CPAN::Reporter to
> screen those out.
I just went through a sampling of fail reports for my stuff. There was one
legitimate packaging bug, and a couple of legitimate errors due to updates to
Perl. About 35% of the other reports are these.
I love the "Illegal seek" error message:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2007/09/msg602208.html
Pod::Man is broken. Think about that for a while:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2006/01/msg286775.html
No information; useless:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/07/msg221656.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2006/02/msg290834.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/07/msg223400.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/07/msg223401.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/07/msg223402.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/07/msg222475.html
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.cpan.testers/2005/06/msg216573.html
> I'm not saying you have to care enough about FAIL reports to go to
> those lengths. Feel free to ignore them -- it's just data. But if
> you care enough to want to avoid any FAIL reports, don't just blame
> the testers when you could be doing something about it instead.
What am I supposed to do? Reply to the reporter? "I'm sorry, this report is
useless! Please fix your installation of Perl and try again."
I've been there, and I have the bounce messages to tell me that they don't
care.
-- c
