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Postings from March 2022
What follows is the rationale for a new label in our issue tracker. In our GitHub issue queue we use the 'BBC' label to designate tickets where a change in blead (the main development branch of Perl) appears to have triggered a build or test failure in a CPAN distribution as reported by CPANtesters (matrix.cpantesters.org). The current list of open BBC tickets can be found here: https://github.com/Perl/perl5/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+sort%3Aupdated-desc+label%3ABBC When we receive a new BBC report, we have to categorize the problem in one of three ways: 1. A bad change in Perl 5 blead which broke well-formed code in a CPAN library. 2. A good change in Perl 5 blead which exposed sub-optimally formed code in a CPAN library. 3. Some combination of 1 and 2. Each category requires its own handling: 1. The onus is on Perl 5 Porters to correct or revert the bad change in blead. The problem should be considered a blocker to the next production release of Perl (in this case, 5.36.0). 2. The onus is on the maintainer of the CPAN distribution to adapt the code so that it will work with the next production release of Perl. In many cases, P5P contributors will open a bug ticket in that distribution's issue tracker and supply a patch to the distribution's maintainer. In this case, we generally do *not* consider the problem to be a blocker to the next production release of Perl, though there may be exceptions. 3. Again, some combination of approaches 1 and 2 needs to be discussed with the CPAN maintainer. The "BBC" label in GitHub is applied to any BBC ticket that falls into any of the three categories above. However, we lack a way of easily spotting those BBC tickets where we have determined that an issue is a non-blocker to the next production release. Hence, I would like to create a "non-5.36-blocker" label and apply it to tickets where either P5P or the upstream maintainer has agreed that the problem does not block 5.36.0. This label will be for the benefit of the 5.36.0 release manager(s) and for people, like myself, who monitor the issue queue for QA purposes; everyone else can ignore it. Any open BBC ticket without a "non-5.36-blocker" will be assumed to be a blocker. Assuming there's no serious objection, I'll create such a label tomorrow and review the open BBC tickets for its applicability. (I'm giving advance notice because adding labels willy-nilly is not a good thing.) Thank you very much. Jim KeenanThread Next