On Fri, 2005-04-01 at 21:43 +0200, Thomas Klausner wrote: > But then, if I write some test (eg to check pod coverage), why should I not > ship them? It's a good feeling to let others know that I took some extra > effort to make sure everything works.
If I use Devel::Cover to check my test coverage, why should I not ship that? If I write use cases to decide which features to add, why should I not ship that? If I use Module::Starter templates for tests and modules, why should I not ship those? They're all tools for the developer, not the user. Any benefit they add to the user comes from the developer using them before the user sees the code. If anything it's *more* useful to ship Devel::Cover tests than POD tests -- cross-platform testing can be difficult and there's the chance of gaining more data. Who does it though? > OK, seriously. CPANTS currently isn't much more than a joke. It might have > some nice benefits, but it is far from a real quality measurment tool. Never > will it happen that the Perl community decides on one set of kwalitee > metrics. That's why we're writing Perl, not Python. Suggestion one: take down the scoreboard. If people agree to your measure of kwalitee, they can see their own scores. If you don't intend to promote your measure as the gold standard of kwalitee, make it difficult for people to measure the rest of us against it. Suggestion two: figure out which kwalitee criteria are valid and worth taking seriously and which aren't and drop the second or make them optional. There are good, repeatable, automatably testable metrics that are close enough to objective standards that it's worth promoting them. Suggestion three: figure out what the goals of the POD kwalitee criteria are and test those. I don't think the criteria should be "ships test files containing strings that match heuristics for the presence and use of two POD-testing modules." If anything, a better criterion comes from running those tests yourself. There are legitimate questions of Quality that kwalitee can never address, but there are legitimate questions of Quality that kwalitee can. I suggest to focus on those as far as possible. Sure, it'll never be the last word on what's good and what isn't, but the metrics could be a lot more useful. I would like to see that. -- c
