CPAN Testers 2.0 end-February update and next steps

By dagolden | Published: March 7, 2010

It’s never great to post an “end-February” report a week into March, but that’s how things are going lately. I’ve been busy with family and work obligations that have meant less CT2.0 hacking. I’m sorry this is coming late, but I hope I will give anyone interested a sense of where things stand.

I should note that the original deadline for finishing CT2.0 was March 1 and clearly we’re not there yet. I’ve discussed the situation with Robert and Ask at the Perl NOC, and they’ve been willing to extend the deadline for cutting off CT1.0 for a while longer. Thank you, Robert and Ask, for your understanding!

Progress in the last couple weeks:

  • I did some alpha testing of the CT2.0 Metabase hosted on Amazon. Based on that, I revised yet again (sigh) the user registration/credentials approach to minimize the hassle for old and new registrants.
  • Florian Ragwitz wrote a Catalyst app to help distribute new credentials files to legacy CT1.0 users. I haven’t deployed it yet (since I now need to regenerate all the credentials), but greatly appreciate his quick turnaround.
  • I implemented the Metabase search capabilities that Barbie will need to update the CPAN Testers statistics database. This will be based on the excellent SQL::Abstract approach to WHERE clause construction.
  • I wrote several helper modules to simplify configuration of a CPAN Testers metabase in preparation for deployment. The first of these has already been uploaded to CPAN: Net::Amazon::Config
  • I finalized the “version 0″ API for the Metabase web service and revised the interface between the Catalyst app and the Metabase to reflect the latest changes to the library.

In the last several weeks, members the #catalyst and #moose IRC channels were very, very helpful and patiently answered my many stupid questions. Thank you in particular to confound, perigrin, rafl, rjbs, stevan and t0m.

Coming up:

  • Deploy all my new code onto the server for “beta” testing
  • Release all the code to CPAN that people will need to configure their clients for beta testing
  • Regenerate user profiles and deploy rafl’s app to distribute them to legacy users
  • Whip the server into production shape (e.g. proper boot scripts to auto-start the CT2.0 apps on restart)
  • Get back to work on legacy report migration

It’s at the point now where I suspect the “hard thinking” part is pretty much done and it’s a lot of grotty but straightforward tasks to go. Hopefully, beta testing won’t reveal any major issues and the end of March update will be focused on planning on orderly transition from CT1.0 to CT2.0.

Posted in cpan-testers, metabase, perl-programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

The power of not being all things to all people

By dagolden | Published: March 2, 2010

The Perl community seems abuzz about the cool new cpanminus client by Tatsuhiko Miyagawa. After about two weeks of development, this is a reasonably functional CPAN client with just a fraction of the overhead, complexity and verbosity of the CPAN and CPANPLUS clients that come with the Perl core.

It’s a remarkable achievement, not only technically, but in the reaction it has sparked. As one of the (sometimes reluctant) maintainers of CPAN and CPANPLUS, I’ve realized that I both love and hate cpanminus.

  • I love that Miyagawa has done so much with so little and in such a short span of time
  • I hate that fanboy-types flocked to it and trashed the older clients without noting cpanminus’ limitations
  • I love that Perl toolchain maintainers have rallied around Miyagawa and contributed their wisdom to make cpanminus better instead of rejecting it
  • I hate that one of Perl’s great strengths (CPAN) has legacy clients that are so unwieldy, hated and difficult to maintain

Miyagawa graciously acknowledges standing on the shoulders of giants. Still, I can’t shake the nagging thought that cpanminus should never have been necessary in the first place.

What I’ve come to realize is that cpanminus is another example of the power of not being all things to all people. Miyagawa doesn’t promise that it works for all of CPAN or that it works everywhere that Perl does. He doesn’t have to. Making it work for 99% of CPAN for 99% of people is more than good enough.

I’ve been co-maintaining various parts of the Perl toolchain for a while now. It’s a frustrating challenge needing to make thing work everywhere, for everything, and trying as hard as possible not to break backwards compatibility. Plus, I don’t even get to use CPAN to make life easier. I don’t get to use handy tools like Moose or DateTime or Regexp::Common or SQLite or anything in the Config::* namespace or even basic tools like Archive::Zip. Nearly everything is done by hand.

Things have to work with just core Perl on a diverse set of platforms and with an incredibly limited set of assumptions. For example, the Perl core still doesn’t come with an HTTP client, so CPAN has to rely on FTP or command line programs to bootstrap LWP. (This is something I personally plan to tackle during the Perl 5.13 development series later this year.)

I think this is an ongoing challenge for core Perl development in general. It’s a lot of work to be all things to all people and I keep wondering whether making things simpler and better for 99% of people would be a better choice. (Anyone else for use strict by default? I hope that finally comes to pass in Perl 5.14.) chromatic writes about this topic often in his Modern Perl blog and I usually tend to agree with the points he makes. (October February 2009 had a particularly good series of posts.)

In the meantime, I look at cpanminus with greed and envy. Miyagawa++

Posted in Uncategorized, cpan, perl-programming, toolchain | Tagged , | 9 Comments

CPAN Testers 2.0: Interim milestone

By dagolden | Published: February 22, 2010

This is just a quick note to say that I’ve successfully configured a test CT2.0 server hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services. I’ve also successfully sent test reports to it from my regular CPAN::Reporter client using Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase. It’s the first end-to-end test of the target architecture for CT2.0.

There are some tweaks I need to make before I’m ready to open it up to beta testing, and all the updated module are still in git and not yet CPAN, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel and (so far) I don’t think it’s a train.

Posted in cpan-testers, metabase, perl-programming | Tagged , | Leave a comment

CPAN Testers 2.0 mid-February update

By dagolden | Published: February 15, 2010

February is a short month and the last couple weeks have flown by. Since my last update, there have been a couple of significant milestones that bring us closer to CT2.0:

  • I successfully created a test Metabase backed by Amazon S3+SimpleDB and have created, retrieved and deleted some user profile facts. This built on some of the earlier work by Leon, but reflected the work I’ve been doing to revise the guts of the Metabase libraries.
  • I wrote a program that converts a given NNTP report into a CPAN::Testers::Report object (which is itself a Metabase Fact subclass.) This wound up being trickier than I expected due to potential for ambiguous mapping of distribution names to actual distribution files. (Thank you to Tokuhirom, Andreas, Takesako and Offer Kaye for reviewing and fixing my exception list.)
  • I generated 900+ Metabase user profiles for all the known CPAN Testers, which will be used to linked with their reports during the conversion process. We still need to figure out a way to distribute these to testers so that new records will link up and other logistics, but this was a necessary step to prepare for conversion.
  • I’ve started configuring Amazon EC2 instances — one for the parallel conversion of reports and one for the CT2.0 server itself. I’m still coming up the learning curve on EC2, but see no obstacles (except time)

My immediate goals are (1) to get a test CT2.0 server up and receiving reports so we can start testing it and (2) prep and run the parallel conversion process. I’ve already gotten some help on the #catalyst channel for #1 (thank you, hobbs) and #2 is now mostly a matter of programming it up now that all the foundational prep work is done.

Hitting the March 1 deadline is going to be tight. We’re still holding at about 2 weeks behind the original estimate (where we’ve been since mid-January). But I think progress is coming fast and furious and I hope to get a solid beta launch by March 1 and negotiate with the Perl NOC for an orderly transition as we ramp up the new service.

Posted in cpan-testers, metabase, perl-programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Can you help identify ambiguous CPAN distributions?

By dagolden | Published: February 8, 2010

Hello, Perl community. As I work on converting legacy CPAN Testers (CT1.0) reports to the new CPAN Testers 2.0 (CT2.0) format, I’ve encountered a curious conundrum and could use some volunteer help.

CT1.0 indexes reports based on the distribution name and version, e.g. “Foo-Bar-1.23″. This is an unfortunate historical accident, since PAUSE does not prevent uploads with the same file name to different author directories:

  • JDOE/Foo-Bar-1.23.tar.gz
  • JQPUBLIC/Foo-Bar-1.23.tar.gz

CT2.0 will index reports based on the full unique distribution file path. I’m currently working on a heuristic to link any given legacy test report (on “Foo-Bar-1.23″) with the correct distribution file path for that distribution name and version for the conversion to CT2.0.

For the most part, it works. Usually, there is only one distribution file path on BackPAN that matches. Sometimes there is more than one possibility, but I’ve worked out ways to resolve the ambiguity by comparing the possibilities to information in the 01mailrc files or the 02packages.details file.

But there are about 50 distribution name-version pairs on BackPAN that my heuristic fails to resolve. Since this is a one-time conversion from CT1.0 to CT2.0, all I need is a mapping file with entries like this for these ambiguous cases:

    YAML-0.39    INGY/YAML-0.39.tar.gz

If you think you can help — either through some automated approach or just by volunteering your human brain to do some basic research to identify the “authoritative” path (e.g. historical author list in the distribution documentation files), that would be a great help for me so I can keep plugging away on the conversion code and other todos.

Even confirming that the candidates on BackPAN have the same md5 sum would be helpful since then even if we guess the wrong author, the test results are still “good” for the mistaken distribution file.

Here is the list. The name-version pair is followed by an indented list of possible paths for that pair.

Attribute-Memoize-0.01
  DANKOGAI/Attribute-Memoize-0.01.tar.gz
  MARCEL/Attribute-Memoize-0.01.tar.gz
B-Generate-1.12_03
  JCROMIE/B-Generate-1.12_03.tar.gz
  JJORE/B-Generate-1.12_03.tar.gz
Bundle-Cobalt-0.01
  HARASTY/Bundle-Cobalt-0.01.tar.gz
  JPEACOCK/Bundle-Cobalt-0.01.tar.gz
CDDB-0.9
  FONKIE/CDDB-0.9.tar.gz
  KRAEHE/CDDB-0.9.tar.gz
Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-File-0.07
  ESSKAR/Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-File-0.07.tar.gz
  KARMAN/Catalyst-Plugin-Session-Store-File-0.07.tar.gz
Catalyst-Plugin-Static-0.05
  MRAMBERG/Catalyst-Plugin-Static-0.05.tar.gz
  SRI/Catalyst-Plugin-Static-0.05.tar.gz
Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.14
  AGRUNDMA/Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.14.tar.gz
  MRAMBERG/Catalyst-Plugin-Static-Simple-0.14.tar.gz
Crypt-SSLeay-0.51
  CHAMAS/Crypt-SSLeay-0.51.tar.gz
  TAKESAKO/Crypt-SSLeay-0.51.tar.gz
Curses-UI-0.72
  MARCUS/Curses-UI-0.72.tar.gz
  MMAKAAY/Curses-UI-0.72.tar.gz
Curses-UI-0.73
  MARCUS/Curses-UI-0.73.tar.gz
  MMAKAAY/Curses-UI-0.73.tar.gz
DateManip-5.20
  PHOENIX/DateManip-5.20.tar.gz
  SBECK/DateManip-5.20.tar.gz
Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.04
  BISSCUITT/Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.04.tar.gz
  MWILSON/Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.04.tar.gz
Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.05
  BISSCUITT/Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.05.tar.gz
  MWILSON/Finance-Bank-HSBC-1.05.tar.gz
Locale-Object-0.73
  EMARTIN/Locale-Object-0.73.tar.gz
  FOTANGO/Locale-Object-0.73.tar.gz
MARC-0.81
  BBIRTH/MARC-0.81.tar.gz
  ESUMMERS/MARC-0.81.tar.gz
MARC-1.13
  ESUMMERS/MARC-1.13.tar.gz
  PETDANCE/MARC-1.13.tar.gz
Mail-Thread-2.41
  RCLAMP/Mail-Thread-2.41.tar.gz
  SIMON/Mail-Thread-2.41.tar.gz
Math-MatrixReal-1.1
  ANDK/Math-MatrixReal-1.1.tar.gz
  STBEY/Math-MatrixReal-1.1.tar.gz
Maypole-Authentication-Abstract-0.6
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Authentication-Abstract-0.6.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Authentication-Abstract-0.6.tar.gz
Maypole-Config-YAML-0.1
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Config-YAML-0.1.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Config-YAML-0.1.tar.gz
Maypole-Loader-0.1
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Loader-0.1.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Loader-0.1.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Authentication-Abstract-0.10
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Authentication-Abstract-0.10.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Authentication-Abstract-0.10.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Component-0.05
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Component-0.05.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Component-0.05.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Config-YAML-0.04
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Config-YAML-0.04.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Config-YAML-0.04.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Exception-0.03
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Exception-0.03.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Exception-0.03.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-I18N-0.02
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-I18N-0.02.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-I18N-0.02.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Loader-0.03
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Loader-0.03.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Loader-0.03.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Relationship-0.03
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Relationship-0.03.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Relationship-0.03.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Transaction-0.02
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Transaction-0.02.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Transaction-0.02.tar.gz
Maypole-Plugin-Untaint-0.04
  BOBTFISH/Maypole-Plugin-Untaint-0.04.tar.gz
  SRI/Maypole-Plugin-Untaint-0.04.tar.gz
Net-DNS-0.02
  ANDK/Net-DNS-0.02.tar.gz
  MFUHR/Net-DNS-0.02.tar.gz
Net-SSH2-0.07
  AWA/AWA/Net-SSH2-0.07.tar.gz
  DBROBINS/Net-SSH2-0.07.tar.gz
NetPacket-0.04
  ATRAK/NetPacket-0.04.tar.gz
  CGANESAN/NetPacket-0.04.tar.gz
PDL-2.3.2
  CSOE/PDL-2.3.2.tar.gz
  KGB/PDL-2.3.2.tar.gz
PNGgraph-1.11
  DMOW/PNGgraph-1.11.tar.gz
  SBONDS/PNGgraph-1.11.tar.gz
POE-Session-Attributes-0.01
  CFEDDE/POE-Session-Attributes-0.01.tar.gz
  JSN/POE-Session-Attributes-0.01.tar.gz
Plucene-1.19
  SIMON/Plucene-1.19.tar.gz
  STRYTOAST/Plucene-1.19.tar.gz
RT-Extension-MergeUsers-0.02
  JESSE/RT-Extension-MergeUsers-0.02.tar.gz
  KEVINR/RT-Extension-MergeUsers-0.02.tar.gz
SNMP-1.6
  GSM/SNMP-1.6.tar.gz
  WMARQ/SNMP-1.6.tar.gz
SXIP-Membersite-1.0.0
  KGRENNAN/SXIP-Membersite-1.0.0.tar.gz
  TOKUHIROM/SXIP-Membersite-1.0.0.tar.gz
Scalar-Defer-0.13
  AUDREYT/Scalar-Defer-0.13.tar.gz
  NUFFIN/Scalar-Defer-0.13.tar.gz
Term-Prompt-0.02
  ALLENS/Term-Prompt-0.02.tar.gz
  DAZJORZ/Term-Prompt-0.02.tar.gz
Term-Prompt-0.05
  ALLENS/Term-Prompt-0.05.tar.gz
  DAZJORZ/Term-Prompt-0.05.tar.gz
Test-Warn-0.07
  BIGJ/Test-Warn-0.07.tar.gz
  MPRESSLY/Test-Warn-0.07.tar.gz
Time-0.01
  JPRIT/Time-0.01.tar.gz
  PGOLLUCCI/Time-0.01.tar.gz
Tk-Wizard-Bases-1.07
  LGODDARD/Tk-Wizard-Bases-1.07.tar.gz
  MTHURN/Tk-Wizard-Bases-1.07.tar.gz
UUID-0.03
  CFABER/UUID-0.03.tar.gz
  LZAP/UUID-0.03.tar.gz
Win32-EventLog-Carp-1.21
  IKEBE/Win32-EventLog-Carp-1.21.tar.gz
  RRWO/Win32-EventLog-Carp-1.21.tar.gz
YAML-0.39
  INGY/YAML-0.39.tar.gz
  KING/YAML-0.39.tar.gz
finance-yahooquote_0.19
  DJPADZ/finance-yahooquote_0.19.tar.gz
  EDD/finance-yahooquote_0.19.tar.gz
libapreq-1.33
  GEOFF/libapreq-1.33.tar.gz
  STAS/libapreq-1.33.tar.gz
pg95perl5-1.2.0
  MERGL/pg95perl5-1.2.0.tar.gz
  YVESP/pg95perl5-1.2.0.tar.gz
Posted in cpan-testers, perl-programming | Tagged , | 8 Comments

An English-only Planet Iron Man

By dagolden | Published: February 6, 2010

I’m very happy to know that Perl has global appeal from seeing all the non-English Perl blogs aggregated on Planet Iron Man, but since I’m a (typical American) monoglot, I’d prefer an Iron Man feed with only English articles. So I made one.

It’s available at http://feeds.dagolden.com/ironman-english.xml. It updates hourly from the master feed.

And for the curious, or for anyone who wants to adapt this for other languages, here’s the Perl program that I whipped-up to create the feed:

# feedfilter.pl - downloads and filters the Perl Ironman feed for English
# entries. Results sent to STDOUT.
#
# The heuristic filters out entries unless the content is mostly latin
# characters and English is close to the best guess of a language.  Short
# entries with code seem to confuse Lingua::Identify, so we take entries that
# seem "close-enough".  Tuned via trial-and-error.
#
# Copyright (c) 2010 by David Golden - This may be used or copied under the
# same terms as Perl itself.

use 5.008001;
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use autodie;

use IO::File;
use Lingua::Identify qw(:language_identification);
use Time::Piece;
use URI;

use XML::Atom::Feed;
$XML::Atom::ForceUnicode = 1;
$XML::Atom::DefaultVersion = "1.0";

# Global heuristic tuning
my $latin_target = 0.95;  # 95% latin chars
my $lang_fuzz = 0.02;     # English within 2% probability of best language

run();

#--------------------------------------------------------------------------#

sub latin_ratio {
  my $string = shift;
  my $alpha =()= $string =~ /(\p{Alphabetic})/g;
  my $latin =()= $string =~ /(\p{Latin})/g;

  return 0 if ! $latin || !$alpha; # !$alpha probably redundant
  return $latin / $alpha;
}

sub run {
  my $in_feed = XML::Atom::Feed->new(URI->new("http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org"));

  my $out_feed = XML::Atom::Feed->new;
  $out_feed->title("Planet Iron Man: English Edition");
  $out_feed->subtitle( $in_feed->subtitle );
  $out_feed->id("tag:feeds.dagolden.com,".gmtime->year().":ironman:english");
  $out_feed->generator("XML::Atom/" . XML::Atom->VERSION);
  $out_feed->updated( gmtime->datetime . "Z" );
  for my $l ( $in_feed->link ) {
    $out_feed->link($l);
  }

  for my $e ( $in_feed->entries ) {
    my $content = $e->content->body;
    my $latin = latin_ratio($content);
    my %lang = langof($content);
    my $best = [sort { $lang{$b} <=> $lang{$a} } keys %lang]->[0];
    $lang{en} ||= 0;
    $out_feed->add_entry($e)
      if $latin > $latin_target && ($lang{$best} - $lang{en} < $lang_fuzz);
  }

  binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");
  print $out_feed->as_xml;
}
Posted in perl-programming | Tagged , | 9 Comments

CPAN Testers 2.0 end-January update

By dagolden | Published: February 4, 2010

The bad news is that we’re still about two weeks behind schedule. The good news is that we’re not falling further behind and in some areas, we’re already ahead.

As I wrote in the last update, a number of my early-January tasks for revising the Metabase libraries didn’t get done and were blocking progress on other fronts. That work is now pretty much complete and I’m ready to turn my attention to the actual migration of legacy reports into a Metabase repository. Once that’s done, we’ll be able to test using it to feed the cpantesters.org databases that Barbie has been preparing for the conversion.

CPAN Testers 2.0 activity in the last couple weeks:

  • I revised Metabase framework libraries to separate user profile information and user authentication into separate facts. This also meant revising the user-profile generation program to match.
  • I implemented new Metabase::Resource classes to standardize extraction indexing data from Metabase::Fact resource strings. (E.g. cpan://distfile/DAGOLDEN/Capture-Tiny-0.07.tar.gz can be indexed under author “DAGOLDEN”, distribution name “Capture-Tiny”, and so on). This wasn’t on the plan, but I discovered that Ricardo and I had never actually gotten around to implementing, so it had to go from stubs to working code.
  • I confirmed that despite all the Metabase framework changes, I could still launch a local Metabase server and send CPAN::Reporter test reports via Test::Reporter::Transport::Metabase. (Thanks to Florian Ragwitz and Matt Trout for patches and guidance respectively on updating the Metabase web server for a more modern Catalyst runtime).
  • Barbie converted cpantesters.org backend databases to index on GUIDs instead of NNTP IDs. Existing legacy report had their NNTP IDs mapped to GUIDs.
  • Barbie and I agreed to have cpantesters.org get updates directly from the Amazon back-end rather than going through a web server. This postpones the need to implement search capability through the web until after launch.

The exact semantics of direct search against the back-end have yet to be worked out, but I’ve decided to hold off on that until we have a Metabase of historical records to experiment against.

At this point, the critical path is the conversion of old articles to the Metabase and the deployment of a web server to inject new reports into it. I’m working on the first, and hope to have both of those done by mid Feb. That leaves us a tight two week period for testing, so stay tuned for the next update.

Posted in cpan-testers, metabase, perl-programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

FreeBSD hates Capture::Tiny

By dagolden | Published: January 29, 2010

At least, FreeBSD 7.1 does.

Could anyone with access to perl on FreeBSD 7.1 please test Capture::Tiny? It now passes test on most platforms, but FreeBSD 7.1 still sometimes fails.

I suspect the FAIL reports I’m seeing are something specific to either CPANPLUS or BinGOs’ smokers, but I need more data points (PASS or FAIL) on that OS to get a better idea of what the issue is.

Thanks!

Oh, and if you haven’t seen the alpha CPAN Testers Analysis site, check this out: Capture-Tiny-0.07 failure analysis. Cool stuff!

Posted in cpan-testers, perl-programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Volunteer needed for help with Capture::Tiny

By dagolden | Published: January 23, 2010

I’m the author of Capture::Tiny, which is intended to be the only STDOUT and STDERR capture tool anyone would ever need. (See the Capture::Tiny presentation on My Talks.)

For a while, I thought I succeeded, but lately a number of test failures have been cropping up on certain platforms. While I’m distracted with many other tasks, I’m looking for a volunteer to analyze the failure reports and develop patches.

A warning: the guts of Capture::Tiny are very pithy and it involves some relatively obscure (insane?) file handle manipulations. It’s not for the faint of heart or the weak in Perl skills. It’s a “Tiny” module — so everything has to be done in just a couple hundred lines of code. But if you like a challenge, you’ll probably enjoy figuring it out.

Please contact me through my cpan.org email address if interested. (I.e. dagolden@ …)

Thanks!

Update: Thanks to quick responses from Robin V. and Christian Walde, it’s clear that several of the failures, particularly on Win32, are due to a broken alarm() function. As that’s just for the test and not critical for Capture::Tiny, I’ll release a new version soon that removes that from testing. Robin++, Christian++ and Perl Community++!

Posted in perl-programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments

CPAN Testers 2.0 mid-January update

By dagolden | Published: January 18, 2010

I’ve been underwater for the last week or so as I became the pumpking-designated person for getting version numbers sorted out for the Perl 5.12 code freeze. I hope to play some catch up this week on tasks I’m behind on — paying work and family permitting.

CPAN Testers 2.0 activity in the last couple weeks:

  • Leon Brocard has implemented Metabase::Archive::S3 and Metabase::Index::SimpleDB — these are in the metabase repo, not yet on CPAN
  • Barbie has revamped the CPAN Testers websites. Reports are now available for browsers through cpantesters.org, not through perl.org. There are other cpantesters.org backend changes that are ahead of schedule and blocking on the launch of a populated CPAN Metabase backend
  • Chris Williams has confirmed that CPANPLUS clients do support Test::Reporter transport alternatives (it might be hacky but should work for our initial needs)
  • Florian Ragwitz has volunteered to be a Catalyst guru and to take a look at the Metabase::Web code
  • Serguei Trouchelle has volunteered to be a beta tester for CPAN::Reporter based smokers
  • I have released CPAN::Testers::Common::Utils, which at the moment just does the “canonical” GUID <=> NNTP ID mapping so people with existing tools or databases will be able to update their tools with links to the new reports on cpantesters.org.

I’m trying out Google Wave to keep the CT2.0 project plan as a live document. If you want to participate in developing CPAN Testers 2.0, please let me know your Wave ID. And if you don’t have Wave access and want it, I still have 20 or so invites.

Posted in cpan-testers, metabase, perl-programming | Tagged , | 2 Comments

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