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Postings from July 2019
You can find data from a test run of the "CPAN-river-3000" against all releases in the current (perl-5.31) development cycle here: ##### http://thenceforward.net/perl/misc/cpan-river-3000.perl-5.31.master.psv.gz ##### In addition, please find attached a file in CSV format holding data about those CPAN distributions which received a grade other than 'PASS' during the most recent monthly run or whose grade changed between the two most recent runs. ##### changes-5.31.1-to-5.31.2.csv ##### I. General Comments The data in these files are intended to be used in the assessment of the impact which Perl 5 development is having on the installability of an important set of CPAN distributions. These are not the only data which can be used or which ought to be used in that assessment. The following items should be noted: 1. During the current 5.31 development cycle we are testing 3000 CPAN distributions. 2. The analysis is being conducted on FreeBSD-12: ##### $ uname -mrs FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE amd64 $ clang --version FreeBSD clang version 6.0.1 (tags/RELEASE_601/final 335540) (based on LLVM 6.0.1) Target: x86_64-unknown-freebsd12.0 Thread model: posix InstalledDir: /usr/bin ##### By doing so, we hope to avoid a monoculture of operating systems and call attention to the fact that the impact of blead on CPAN can differ across platforms. 3. The list of modules selected is curated so that the automated test-against-dev program can run smoothly over its more-than-six-hours length. That means excluding modules that require interactive configuration, modules that make excessive demands with respect to external prerequisites, modules that require too much network access, modules that are subject to timeouts, and so forth. The list of modules was calculated on July 12 2019. 4. On the other hand, the list of modules selected has not been filtered to exclude modules which, notwithstanding the fact that other CPAN distributions depend on them, have been failing tests for years. 5. The test-against-dev process is built on top of Miyagawa's 'cpanm' and Breno G. de Oliveira's CPAN library App::cpanminus::reporter. It therefore benefits from the strengths, and suffers from the flaws, of those two excellent libraries. In particular, if distribution XYZ has a dependency on distribution ABC and if, earlier in the process, ABC has failed, the test-against-dev process will steer clear of attempting to fully test XYZ and will fail to write a report for it. So some modules will "not be reached" and will not show up in the output data until such time as their upstream dependencies are fixed. 6. There are certain CPAN distributions whose prerequisites I have not yet figured out how to install on the platform being used. Those distributions are likely to have a grade of UNKNOWN and their reverse dependencies will not be reached. Tk is a long-standing instance of this problem as its tests require a GUI (or a simulation of a GUI). DBD::Pg was testable during the 5.29 dev cycle on FreeBSD-11, but I haven't gotten it to work yet in this cycle on FreeBSD-12. If you would like further information about this project or to help it along, please contact me off-list. II. Specific Comments As of the date of this posting, I have not been able to attribute any of the non-PASS grades in the list of CPAN distributions tested to changes in Perl 5 blead between 5.31.1 and 5.31.2. I have created bug tickets as needed. III. Acknowledgements This project benefited from discussion at the Perl 5 Core Hackathon held in Amsterdam in October 2017, so thanks to participants in that event and to the organizations which sponsored it. This project also benefits from the generous donation of a server by the New York City BSD Users Group (NYCBUG) and the system administration expertise of Mark Saad and George Rosamond. This project also benefits from the system administration expertise of Andrew Villano of New York Perlmongers. Andrew Villano and I made a presentation on this project at a joint meeting of NYCBUG and New York Perlmongers (ny.pm) on November 7 2018. See below for links. IV. References See my presentation at the North American Perl Conference held in Salt Lake City in June 2018: http://thenceforward.net/perl/tpc/TPC-NA-2018/test-against-dev.pdf Text of the Nov 07 2018 NYCBUG/ny.pm presentation can be found at http://thenceforward.net/perl/talks/nycbug-presentation-20181107.html; slides at http://thenceforward.net/perl/talks/nycbug-presentation-20181107.odp (LibreOffice Impress). Thank you very much. Jim KeenanThread Next