On Tuesday 02 September 2008 12:45:19 David Cantrell wrote: > And no matter how much certain people might bitch and whine about how > users ought to upgrade their toolchain, the fact is that they don't. I > wish they did, but they don't.
If the CPAN Testers client already requires developers to modify their distributions to tease useful information out of reports, then CPAN Testers has failed at being an accurate representation of how distributions fare for normal users. If that's true (and it is), why can't the CPAN Testers client require people installing the client to upgrade their toolchains? I realize that the standard response is "Because then it's not an accurate representation of normal users!" -- but it already isn't, nor must it be to be useful. I already know that my distributions don't work if you don't install the dependencies, or if you use an unsupported version of Perl. You don't have to waste anyone's time testing that. What I don't know is if my distributions work on different operating systems or architectures. I'd love to know that, but if I have to wade through dozens of reports containing no useful information (or worse, sift through FAIL and UNKNOWN reports containing no useful information about my code), it's not worth my time anymore. There's no maybe() function in Test::More for a reason. It certainly does the users no good, especially if they just want to know if they should bother trying to install one particular version on their machine. (Can you answer that from the CPAN Testers results on any distribution's search.cpan.org page without knowing intimate details of how CPAN Testers works?) Like Andy Lester suggests, I'm obviously not the target audience of CPAN Testers. I don't believe normal users are the target audience of CPAN Testers. Who is? -- c
