Testsuites and External Dependancies?

[Mark Fowler]

Hello my fellow Perl Mongers.

I have this module http://metacpan.org/module/Mac::KeyboardMaestro

It's job is to interface with a OS X utility called Keyboard Maestro.  If you don't have Keyboard Maestro installed on your Mac[1] it's useless.  The current version (1.00) will fail its test suite spectacularly in this situation in a rather unforgiving manner.

But now I'm getting failures from the CPAN testers.

The options I see open to me me are:

1) Detect using ps if Keyboard Maestro Engine is running and skip the tests if it's not (and leave the user to wonder why my module passes tests and doesn't work.)

2) As (1), but BAIL OUT instead.  I'm unsure if this is the right thing to do, and I'm unsure if this will stop false negatives from the CPAN testers.

3) Tell the CPAN testers I don't care about reports for this module (which is a problem since I *like* what the CPAN testers do)

Any advice list?

Mark. 

[1] I'm not currently testing if you're running on a Mac but that's okay, since you'll not be able to install Mac::AppleScript which is one of my module's dependancies

-- 
Mark Fowler
http://www.twoshortplanks.com/