Testsuites and External Dependancies?

[Ashley Hindmarsh]

> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 07:48:11 -0500
> From: Mark Fowler <mark at twoshortplanks.com>
> Subject: Testsuites and External Dependancies?
> To: " London. pm Perl M[ou]ngers " <london.pm at london.pm.org>
> Message-ID: <AFD713A761AC42CF930E6F2B33AAEB26 at twoshortplanks.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> 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?
>

I can't help comparing this with a more common case, such as XML::LibXML.
It won't build/test at all unless libxml is installed.
It's just that having libxml (and headers) available is more likely for any
given cpantesters node.

(2) seems sane to me.

  Ash


>
> 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/
>
>
>
>