Testsuites and External Dependancies?

[David Cantrell]

On 06/12/2012 12:48, Mark Fowler wrote:
> 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.

In Makefile.PL or Build.PL, have it die with "OS unsupported".

This will result in a 'NA' report.

See http://wiki.cpantesters.org/wiki/CPANAuthorNotes, "How can I 
indicate that my distribution only works on a particular operating system?"

-- 
David Cantrell | Godless Liberal Elitist

   engineer: n. one who, regardless of how much effort he puts in
     to a job, will never satisfy either the suits or the scientists